Civil Society, Not Laws That Restrict Freedoms, Should Promote Tolerance

Civil Society, Not Laws That
Restrict Freedoms, Should Promote Tolerance

Remarks by Aaron Rhodes
Conference on Interreligious Cooperation and The Prevention of Incitement
to National, Racial and Religious Hatred
United Nations Office Geneva • Room XXIV (24) • 14:00 - 16:30

Geneva, 25 March 2011

I  Introduction

We have confronted many tragic cases of incitement to racial hatred and violence, and hate speech, leading to many crimes by citizens and human rights violations committed by states.In the Balkans, the media fomented hatred that led to crimes topped off by what happened at Srebrenica.  The warnings about possible genocide from hate speech were ignored in Rwanda.  The Helsinki Federation did research on this and published a book on hate speech in the Balkans.  Being a trans-Atlantic group, there were many debates about how far freedom of speech should be restricted in order to clamp down on hate speech.

In Chechnya, violence was encouraged and made possible by a campaign of hatred about people from the Caucasus region.

In the course of this terrible war, the Russian government had passed legislation criminalizing the incitement to racial and ethnic hatred and violence, under pressure from European governments to bring its laws into compliance with the European Convention, and many were worried about racial crimes in Russia, which are a very serious problem.

The Russian-Chechen Friendship Society was a small NGO located in Nizny Novgorad, which promoted tolerance, complained about racism and indeed, denounced racial and nationalist incitement in the Russian state-controlled media.  In 2006, the director of the group, Stanislav Dmitrievsky was convicted by a court for—guess what?—“inciting racial hatred.”  The evidence used to convict him was articles he had published suggesting the Russians negotiate with Chechens to end the bloody war.  The Russian Chechen Friendship Society was forced out of existence and its other leader is now living in Finland.

While this may be an extreme case, it is not the only one in which such laws are turned against human rights in an exaggerated and distorted exploitation of contradictions in human rights law.