Lizzie Francis is legal counsel for the Global Religious Freedom team at ADF International where she works in the MENA and Sub-Saharan African regions.
Among the lesser discussed Conservative manifesto pledges is the commitment to further the free speech agenda through new statutory guidance. This is a commitment which is increasingly becoming necessary as our formerly cornerstone liberty is being eroded by a new wave of advocacy to censor ‘offensive’ opinions.
Building on the success of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, the Conservatives now see the need to embed protection on teachers and the classroom. As well as planning to ban protests outside of schools, the Conservative manifesto states, “We will always support teachers to uphold and promote fundamental British values and ensure they are protected from accusations of blasphemy”.
In March, an independent report of the UK Commission for Countering Extremism revealed that anti-blasphemy activism in the UK is “gaining momentum and showing signs of becoming increasingly radicalised”, fueled most prevalently today by certain Islamic movements and the trigger of ‘insulting’ expressions.
The disturbing incident at Batley Grammar School in 2021, where a teacher was forced into hiding and still must use a false identity simply because they showed pupils a cartoon picture of the Prophet Muhammad, highlighted to the nation that, despite the lack of a blasphemy law in statute, certain community members feel entitled to punish others for their speech or expressions.
A separate incident in Wakefield in March 2023 had the scuffing of a Quran in the school corridors registered by police as a non-criminal ‘hate incident’ while the pupils concerned faced death threats from local Muslims. New statutory guidance, proposed by Lord Walney, would place a legal duty on schools to protect teachers who could offend on issues such as religion, race, and gender.
A quick glance at the global landscape shows how critical a proposal like this now is when a nation simultaneously houses impassioned religious communities while at the same time allowing freedom of speech to be eroded. For, while official blasphemy laws – which punish people with a fine to the death sentence for insulting or denigrating a god or religion – are part of the legal system in over 70 countries, current trends show that it need not be the black letter law itself that produces some of the worst punishments for so-called ‘offenders’ of religion.
Pakistan retains one of the most severe blasphemy laws in the world, where at least 330 people were charged in 180 cases last year for such acts as insulting the Prophet Muhammad or denigrating the Quran. Some, like Anwar Kenneth, face decades in jail as they await a court date to challenge their death sentence for such innocuous ‘crimes’ as handing out Christian pamphlets.
Yet, last summer in Jaranwala, the power of the mob showed that legislation was not needed for the community to bring justice to bear themselves. When reports spread of two Christians ripping out pages from the Quran, it only took a few hours for a Muslim cleric to stir up the crowd and for hundreds of people to form a violent and rioting mob that destroyed 40 churches and 90 Christian homes. At the end of March, an angry mob rose up again, killing a 74-year old man who was merely suspected of blasphemy for desecrating the Quran.
In Nigeria, the power of an angry mob spurred by accusations of the Holy Prophet being blasphemed has also led to injustice. Despite the country’s constitution defending freedom of expression on paper, many of the Sharia-based Northern States retain blasphemy laws with the punishment of death. Yet, like in Pakistan, the heartbreaking case of young Deborah Samuel shows how severe mob violence can be in the face of Islamic insult.
Deborah, a Christian student who merely thanked Jesus in a school WhatsApp group when she passed an exam, was publicly lynched and then stoned to death in 2021 by her peers who appointed themselves the arbiters of justice. When Sufi musician Yahaya Sharif-Aminu was only 19 years old, his WhatsApp lyrics similarly stirred up the anger of a crowd to the extent that they burned down his family home because of his religious offense. He still awaits an appeal to the Supreme Court to challenge his death sentence for the alleged blasphemy.
In the UK, protests condemning acts of alleged blasphemy are escalating at an alarming rate. Despite UK-based activists claiming to denounce violence in their response to the offense caused to their religion, global examples – such as also in Sudan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Egypt and Jordan – show that the power of the mob can be devastating when blasphemy accusations are taken into a community’s own hands.
Outside of the ‘offense’ to religion, the escalation of alleged ‘misgendering’ of pupils by teachers provides additional impetus to the need for statutory guidance as teachers with conservative views are facing prohibitory orders. At the end of May, the Maths teacher Joshua Sutcliffe appealed to the High Court after the Teaching Regulation Agency declared that his professional conduct had been “unacceptable” for not using a preferred pronoun of a pupil and saying other opinions relating to his Christian faith.
With attempts to force the demise of freedom of speech and expression by radical groups who resort not to the judicial processes but to their private religious laws, the embedding of free speech regulations into arenas established for the free exchange of ideas – not least universities and schools – is now not just a good manifesto idea, but critical for our democratic freedoms.
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Author: Lizzie Francis
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