Free speech and the Muslim exception

Free speech is often presented as a near-absolute liberal value: open debate exposes error, helps people develop, and keeps governments accountable. The paper accepts these aims but points out that no democracy treats speech as unlimited. Defamation, threats and incitement are punished everywhere, and many states go further.

The authors start with John Stuart Mill. His On Liberty defends wide freedom of discussion, but his harm principle allows limits to prevent harm to others: an article accusing corn dealers of starving the poor should be tolerated, while the same message shouted to an angry mob outside a corn dealer's house may be punished. Later thinkers widened the case for limits. Joel Feinberg argued that serious offence can sometimes justify restriction, and Jeremy Waldron that hate speech attacks the dignity of groups as equal members of society. International law agrees: Article 20(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights requires states to prohibit advocacy of religious hatred that incites discrimination, hostility or violence.

The paper then lists limits that liberal states already enforce: Germany's 2020 law against desecrating EU and foreign flags, France's Gayssot Act and Austria's laws against Holocaust denial, and court rulings in Iceland, Sweden and Canada upholding penalties for leaflets or comments vilifying gay people. Against these it sets cases involving Islam: a Paris court's 2007 acquittal of Charlie Hebdo's editor over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, a UK law that expressly protects ridicule and insult of religions, a Swedish court overturning a ban on Qur'an-burning protests, and France's ban on its athletes wearing the hijab at the 2024 Paris Olympics, which Amnesty International criticised as discriminatory.

The authors conclude that free speech, as practised, depends on power and political context rather than working as a neutral principle. They do not call for abandoning open debate. Instead they ask liberal states to apply the harm principle consistently, treating the vilification of Muslims as they treat the vilification of Jewish or gay people, while protecting peaceful religious expression such as wearing the hijab and peaceful protest.