Freedom of expression in TCS

My considered thoughts on freedom of expression, as summed up for TCS:

It has been a sad week for freedom of expression. Hrant Dink, a prominent journalist convicted last year of insulting Turkish identity in an article about the Armenian genocide of 1915, was shot in Istanbul. Brigitte Zypries, the German minister of justice, announced that Germany would be using its current presidency of the European Union to push for an EU-wide ban on Holocaust denial and the display of Nazi insignia. There is obvious gulf between these two cases, and it might be considered crass to compare the killers of a man who fought for the recognition of a genocide with a government intent on making denial of another genocide a crime. But the death of Hrant Dink is a sickening illustration of the dangers of government enforced versions of the past.

Dink was the editor of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, which published a series of articles examining the Ottoman Empire’s treatment of Armenians during World War One. One of these contained a line in which prosecutors claimed Dink denigrated the purity of Turkish blood, and in October 2005 he was convicted under article 301 of the Turkish penal code - an article which makes it an offence to insult ‘Turkishness’ - and given a six-month suspended sentence. With the state having declared his guilt, Dink began receiving an increasing volume of threats and feared for his safety, a fear realised on Friday with a bullet to the back of his head.

The intentions of those seeking to criminalise Holocaust denial are admirable. To distort the past and accuse a people who suffered so much of the greatest fraud in history is a loathsome and dangerous act, and it is already illegal to do so in nine EU member states. But by claiming the right to silence contrary opinion the state empowers individuals to do the same, and silence their opponents as Hrant Dink was silenced on Friday. Free debate in Europe will not undermine the factuality of the Holocaust, but across the Bosporus a frank discussion of the events of 1915 might reconcile modern Turkey with a fuller account of its recent past. As part of Turkey’s stalling accession talks, the EU is pushing for legal reform. If it wants article 301 written out of the statute books, member states should argue from a position of enshrined free speech and not hypocrisy, and instead of extending the illegality of Holocaust denial, abandon attempts to cosset the past.