The pan-European trend to abolish blasphemy laws

We begin with England:

Blasphemy has been a crime for centuries in England based on case law. It is a country of hereditary monarchy. It has a state religion led by the monarch and is characterized, as it is widely known, by the attachment to agelong traditions. In practice, the criminalization of blasphemy had fallen into disuse. Its last victim appears to have been Mr. John Gott who described Jesus as a circus jester and was sentenced in 1922 to nine months’ imprisonment and forced labor. Since then, even when the offence was apparent, the courts have found workarounds and excuses not to condemn persons exercising their freedom of expression, guaranteed by the English legal tradition and, most recently, the European conventions. Fanatic Christians and Muslims though have brought the judges into trouble with their lawsuits against “blasphemers”. The parliament had been pressured by committees and organizations to decriminalize blasphemy, but it has not done so.

When an English teacher was convicted of blasphemous acts in Sudan in 2008, great mobilization took place in her country. But some pointed out that it was not reasonable for the British to complain about Sudan’s counter–freedom and backward legislation while blasphemy is still a crime in their country. The abolition movement was strengthened. Even the Anglican Church leadership said it did not oppose the abolition of the offence. The parliament decriminalized blasphemy on 08-05-2008. And it did so in a few simple words: “The customary offences of blasphemy and blasphemous publication are abolished in England and Wales” (Article 79 (1) of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act).

In France, a country of enlightenment and structurally distant from the Catholic and any other church, blasphemy was not an offence ever since the time of the 1789 Declaration that guaranteed free expression, regardless of what the secular or religious authorities believe and want. A historically interpreted exception concerned the Alsace and Lorraine regions. When they were annexed to France at the end of the First World War, these areas retained parts of German law, particularly on religious and labor issues. Articles 166 and 167 of the Local Criminal Code provided for imprisonment of up to three years for “public blasphemy against God”. As in England, the provisions had been inactive for decades and many had called for their abolition.

In 2013, a union of Muslim lawyers sued the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Strasbourg, citing the local law. The court considered the proceedings invalid, but the case left a trauma. The ridicule of sacred things is not an offence in Paris, but it can send you to prison in Strasbourg if the magazine is also sold there. On January 2015, as we all know, the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo’s offices was made, imposing silence of death on its associates. At a time when almost all France declared “Nous sommes Charlie” and spoke against the bigoted murderers, it would be grotesque for an Alsace tribunal to sue that same magazine for blasphemy.
Many organizations, including the Alsatian religious leaders of all great religions, called for the abolition of blasphemy provisions. So, with the blessing of the shepherds as well as of the flocks, the French Parliament put a clause into a law on social policy, the Article 172 which repealed Articles 166 and 167 of the Alsatian and Lorraine Penal Code for blasphemy. The law came into force on 27-01-2017, throwing in the rubbish of history the remnant of pre-enlightenment blasphemy ban in France.

Denmark. Hereditary monarchy with state religion, the Evangelical Folkekirke, and tremendous respect for traditions and for “community” life. For centuries, it has been a crime to ridicule or defame the divine, a prohibition ever since 1866 by the §140 of the Penal Code, providing a sentence of imprisonment of up to four months. No one has been convicted for blasphemy in Denmark since 1946. Nonetheless, religious fanatics continued to sue the “blasphemers”, including the journalists who in 2005 published cartoons with Muhammad in the Jyllands-Posten newspaper. And while the Danes were stunned by the Muslims who burned Danish flags across the globe and attacked the country’s embassies because of some cartoon publication in a provincial newspaper, the journalists of the newspaper faced criminal prosecutions in their country!

The absurdity was intensified in 2015 when prosecution was brought against a Dane who published a facebook video in which he burned a copy of the Koran in his garden. This gentleman may be rude or foolish. But can the Danish state imprison him because he expresses his opinion? In February 2016, there were attacks with dead and wounded in Copenhagen against “infidels” by a Danish Muslim. It was impossible for the trial against the “facebook blasphemer” to continue. Following consultations and pressure from organizations, the Danish Parliament passed Law 675 on 08-06-2017. Let us all admire the Doric simplicity of the provision: “paragraph 140 is abolished.”
(Doric = Laconic, taciturn, austere, terse).

By abolishing the blasphemy offence, England, France and Denmark secured more freedom for their citizens and they became more civilised. Similarly, Norway, Iceland and Malta have decriminalized blasphemy in recent years.
Since this article’s publication, Ireland has been added to the countries that decriminalized blasphemy, the Spanish Government has also expressed the same intention.

Let’s get to ourselves.

The abolition of blasphemy is legally and politically imperative. It will solve practical problems and will allow everyone to express their views on religious issues without facing the possibility of persecution for an offence without a victim and without sufficient constitutional justification.
The prohibition of blasphemy does not have either generic or specific prudential functions. It only develops symbolic results, providing penal support to state religiosity, showing in other words to everyone that the state disapproves and punishes the insult to the divine. This message, however, is contrary to the modern constitutional organization and shows that criminal law is used for political purposes, which is also contrary to its promises, protection of the “legal rights” of individuals. The practical functioning of the blasphemy provision is therefore the main argument for its abolition.

The last and decisive argument for the abolition is that the ban on blasphemy in Greece does not protect religions in general, but the Orthodox Church exclusively. The police and the public prosecutor’s office undertake the daily ratification of state piety by suppressing “daily blasphemy”, and Orthodox operatives, paid by the state, sometimes in consultation with far-right politicians, persecute artists who disturb them. No prosecution has been made for decades to defend any other religion, demonstrating the actual and extremely discriminatory functioning of those provisions in practice. In this case, state criminal justice functions as a kind of private security for a single religion and obeys to the ritual of confirmation for the state religiosity.

The experience abroad shows that there is a constant stream of abolitions as we have seen. In addition to the liberal principles, it has been realized that persecutions and convictions exacerbate the spirits and threaten social peace much more than a phrase or artwork. Even those who consider Charlie Hebdo’s irony distasteful and reproachable cannot tolerate a situation where states prosecute and imprison precisely those whom religious terrorists want to kill.

In Greece the constitutional, political and cultural existence of a dominant religion – and, through it, the prevalence of religiosity in public life – poses great obstacles to reform efforts. No political “change” after the end of the military dictatorship has been able to decolorize the state from religion. Feudal remnants of religious content are particularly resilient and the abolition of the blasphemy provision without deeper changes in the constitutional self-understanding of the Greek state seems impossible.

However, no political “realism” should prevent legal-political criticism and social struggle for the elimination of regulations that citizens consider unacceptable and the state should abolish for reasons of consistency with its constitutional pronouncements.

The decriminalization of blasphemy is a tiny and timid step towards civilization of the state. A minimal step, but an absolutely necessary one, *beep* Jesus *beep*…
(A very common Greek swear phrase that demonstrates indignation.)