GagWatch

A television production crew was expelled on Thursday from a UN meeting discussing freedom of expression and “defamation of religions.”

Two journalists from the French-German cultural channel ARTE were asked to leave a meeting room at the UN’s European headquarters during a public session of a human rights body preparing for a racism conference in South Africa later this year.

The journalists were working on a documentary on how the issue of human rights is debated at the United Nations.

Apparently, the expulsion was ordered at the behest of the irony-deficient Organisation of Islamic Conference and by the African group of states.

Muslim participants to the meeting are seeking to introduce a concept of “defamation of religions” into a proposed declaration. European states have strongly opposed this with three – Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands – threatening to boycott the conference in Durban if the resolution is accepted.

Based on the graphic novel by Claus Deleuran, Rejsen Til Saturn (Journey to Saturn) tells the tale of what happens when a Danish crew of misfits travel in space to find natural gas. The film is due to be released on Friday and promises a fart and belch fuelled lampoon of a whole host of political and religious beliefs. Except one (via).

The one Muslim character in the film has been exempted from any religious satire because the director was concerned about his own, and his family’s, safety.

“It’s unfortunately been impossible to make fun of the Muslims’ religion. I think we make many jabs at the person Jamil in the film, but it’s correct that we’re not touching his belief.  It’s simply too sensitive an area, that I can’t take the responsibility to get involved.  I certainly need to think of both my family and my workplace.  I’m not a fighter, and I don’t like to have raging Muslims knocking on my door,” says Thorbjørn Christoffersen.

“I 100% support that people should be able to make fun of everything.  but this is not about special consideration for Muslims, it’s about consideration for myself and my family,” says the director.

Brian Mikkelsen, Denmark’s Justice Minister – and former Culture Minister – has expressed sadness at this:

“It’s sad it it’s become so that individual artists censure themselves out of fear of religious fanatics.  We have in Dnemark a strong and good tradition of satire, also in connection with religious subjects.  And we should hold fast to it.”

From the trailer, the film does look like it could be a lot of fun. It is a shame, though – to put it mildly – that the people behind the film should feel threathened into holding back.

The Wall Street Journal (via) has picked up the previously mentioned news that a Jordanian court is prosecuting 12 Europeans, including Geert Wilders, in an extraterritorial attempt to silence the debate on radical Islam.

The prosecutor general in Amman charged the 12 with blasphemy, demeaning Islam and Muslim feelings, and slandering and insulting the prophet Muhammad in violation of the Jordanian Penal Code. The charges are especially unusual because the alleged violations were not committed on Jordanian soil.

Among the defendants is the Danish cartoonist whose alleged crime was to draw in 2005 one of the Muhammad illustrations that instigators then used to spark Muslim riots around the world. His co-defendants include 10 editors of Danish newspapers that published the images. The 12th accused man is Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, who supposedly broke Jordanian law by releasing on the Web his recent film, “Fitna,” which tries to examine how the Quran inspires Islamic terrorism.

The article goes on to point out that, far from being an isolated case, this attempt at criminalising foreign free speech is part of a larger campaign to use the law and international forums to intimidate critics of militant Islam.

In December, the UN General Assembly passed the Resolution on Combating Defamation of Religions; the only religion mentioned by name was Islam. And, in June, the U.N. Human Rights Council said it would refrain from condemning human-rights abuses related to “a particular religion.”

The ban applies to all religions, but it was prompted by Muslim countries that complained about linking Islamic law, Shariah, to such outrages as female genital mutilation and death by stoning for adulterers. This kind of self-censorship could prove dangerous for people suffering abuse, and it follows the council’s March decision to have its expert on free speech investigate individuals and the media for negative comments about Islam.

In the Jordanian case, the prosecutor is relying on a 2006 amendment to the Jordanian Justice Act – passed in response to the Muhammed Cartoons Controversy – that allows for the prosecution of individuals whose actions affect the Jordanian people by “electronic means,” such as the Internet. This amendment, in theory, means anyone who publishes on the Internet could be subject to prosecution in Jordan.

Obviously, neither Denmark nor the Netherlands are about to start turning over citizens over to face a charge as repressive as this one, and it is unlikely that any other Western democracy would either. But there is no such guarantee if any of the defendants travel to countries that are more sympathetic to the Jordanian court.

Unless democratic countries stand up to this challenge to free speech, other nations may be emboldened to follow the Jordanian example. Kangaroo courts across the globe will be ready to charge free people with obscure violations of other societies’ norms and customs, and send Interpol to bring them to stand trial in frivolous litigation.

A new form of forum shopping would soon take root. Activists would be able to choose countries whose laws and policies are informed by their religious values to prosecute critical voices in other countries. The case before the Jordanian court is not just about Mr. Wilders and the Danes. It is about the subjugation of Western standards of free speech to fear and coercion by foreign courts.

The sort of libel shopping that UK courts allow is bad enough. An offendedness market such as this would be much, much worse.

Denmark has evacuated (via) staff from its embassies in Algeria and Afghanistan to secret safe locations because of an imminent threat. The Danish Security and Intelligence Service are concerned about an aggravated terror threat level against Danish interests following the reprinting earlier this year of Kurt Westergaard’s Mo-Toon as a protest over a plot to murder the cartoonist.

The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) is drawing up plans (via) to demand legal redress from nations, like Denmark, that allow freedom of speech.

The new charter, drafted at a meeting in Dakar commits the OIC “to protect and defend the true image of Islam” and “to combat the defamation of Islam.” The report urges the creation of a “legal instrument” to crack down on defamation of Islam, although the nature of such a “legal instrument” has not been spelled out.

The International Humanist and Ethical Union in Geneva released a statement accusing the Islamic states of attempting to limit freedom of expression and of attempting to misuse the U.N.

Human Rights Watch said in a statement that objectionable depictions of the Prophet Muhammad do not “give them the right under international human rights law to insist that others abide by their views.”

David Thompson gets to the heart of the matter:

[P]erhaps we should peel away the rhetoric of victimhood, used so indecently, and look at what’s actually being demanded here: A right not to hear that one is being irrational, dishonest or mortifyingly stupid, regardless of just how irrational, dishonest or mortifyingly stupid one actually is. That’s a license of no small magnitude, and one that a person of good faith would neither grant nor desire.

Dutch Prime Minister, Jan Peter Balkenende is hoping to achieve some European solidarity in the event of violent reactions to Geert Wildeers’ Fitna at the EU summit in Brussels today.

The film is not an official agenda item, but Balkenende will broach the matter during the dinner in the evening. He and other Dutch ministers have been already talking with other European governments about the possible reactions to the film.

The Dutch are hoping for more support than Denmark received two years ago after the Muhammed cartoons were published.

The attempt to organise a boycott (via) of Danish products in Saudi Arabia is still rumbling on and Hatim Misfir, a government official in the country, has trotted out the old canard about freedom of press and expression being okay as long as no-one uses it.

Last week, French cartoonist Plantu appeared to endorse this position, expressing concern over renewed tensions between the West and the Islamic world after the republication of the cartoons. Making the rather bizarre assertion that you can somehow kill people with cartoons, Plantu claimed to be advocating “the right to nuance.”

Nuance, of course, is the one thing that those making the threats seem to lack as is evidenced by the news (via) that several men who share the same name as the cartoonist whose life was threatened have also been threatened. There are 81 people in Denmark called Kurt Westergaard, several are now under police protection from stupid people taking offence.

Geert Wilders has expressed anger at the lack of support from his political colleagues in The Hague after an Al Qaeda-affiliated website called for the PVV politician to be “slaughtered” for his insults to Islam and the prophet Mohammed. Wilders has accused his parliamentary colleagues of “complete disinterest” regarding the threats and expressed outrage at the passive stance taken by Prime Minister Balkenende, who said in January that the Koran film could lead to a “serious crisis situation.”

Not completely passive, though, as it has also emerged that the Dutch government looked into whether Wilders’ film could be banned before it was released. Sources close to the cabinet have confirmed that the government prosecutor has investigated whether there are legal grounds to prevent the film from being released. Such a ban would be opposed by the socialist PvdA.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, several hundred people took to the streets to demonstrate that knowing nothing about a film is no barrier to objecting to it. Objecting to both the reprinting of the Mo-Toons (but not the murder plot that led to the reprinting) and Wilders’ still unreleased film, the demonstrators burned Dutch and Danish flags and called on the government to expel both the Dutch and Danish embassies from Afghanistan and stop any diplomatic relations with the two countries.

Following this demonstration Nato’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, has expressed concern that the film – if released – will have repercussions for troops in Afghanistan.

First the good news. Aleksandr Sdvizhkov, the editor in Belarus who was jailed for publishing the Muhammed cartoons back in 2006 has been released.

More than a 1,000 (mainly small and local) Danish websites were hacked by some individual calling himself United Arab Hackers and reportedly from Saudi Arabia. The websites of international companies based in Denmark, such as Lurpak and Carlsberg, were not affected.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir is threatening to expel Danish organizations, snub its officials and boycott the country’s products in reaction to the republished cartoons. Denmark’s foreign aid minister is considering whether this might have consequences for Danish aid (130.2 million kroner last year) to the African country.

Bahrainis took to the streets and the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe jumped on the bandwagon.

With thanks to Media Watch Watch (twice) and The Comics Reporter.

Updated

The Vatican and the Al-Azhar university in Cairo have issued a joint statement condeming (via) the republication of the cartoon but studiously avoiding any mention of the foiled murder plot against the 72-year-old cartoonist which prompted the republications.

The Comics Reporter (via) has a lengthy and depressing update of the state of the second run of the Muhammed Cartoons conroversy.

In Egypt…

• Four international newspapers were banned by government officials for recent republication of the images. Two of the papers have never printed the cartoon
• The Danish Ambassador to Cairo was summoned by the Egyptian government to listen to another rant
• Thousands of students protested
• And two football matches have been cancelled.

Elsewhere…

• Yemen has suspended friendship with Denmark’s parliament
• In Jordan, the lower house of Parliament fails to recognise that freedom is a value