27 Dec 13 | Digital Freedom, Europe and Central Asia, European Union, News and features, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture
This article is part of a series based on our report, Time to Step Up: The EU and freedom of expression.
Since the entering into force of the Lisbon Treaty on 1 December 2009, which made the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights legally binding, the EU has gained an important tool to deal with breaches of fundamental rights.
The Lisbon Treaty also laid the foundation for the EU as a whole to accede to the European Convention on Human Rights. Amendments to the Treaty on European Union (TEU) introduced by the Lisbon Treaty (Article 7) gave new powers to the EU to deal with state who breach fundamental rights.
The EU’s accession to the ECHR, which is likely to take place prior to the European elections in June 2014, will help reinforce the power of the ECHR within the EU and in its external policy. Commission lawyers believe that the Lisbon Treaty has made little impact, as the Commission has always been required to assess whether legislation is compatible with the ECHR (through impact assessments and the fundamental rights checklist) and because all EU member states are also signatories to the Convention.[1] Yet external legal experts believe that accession could have a real and significant impact on human rights and freedom of expression internally within the EU as the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) will be able to rule on cases and apply European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence directly. Currently, CJEU cases take approximately one year to process, whereas cases submitted to the ECHR can take up to 12 years. Therefore, it is likely that a larger number of freedom of expression cases will be heard and resolved more quickly at the CJEU, with a potential positive impact on justice and the implementation of rights in the EU.[2]
The Commission will also build upon Council of Europe standards when drafting laws and agreements that apply to the 28 member states. Now that these rights are legally binding and are subject to formal assessment, this may serve to strengthen rights within the Union.[3] For the first time, a Commissioner assumes responsibility for the promotion of fundamental rights; all members of the European Commission must pledge before the Court of Justice of the European Union that they will uphold the Charter.
The Lisbon Treaty also provides for a mechanism that allows European Union institutions to take action, whether there is a clear risk of a “serious breach” or a “serious and persistent breach”, by a member state in their respect for human rights in Article 7 of the Treaty of the European Union. This is an important step forward, which allows for the suspension of voting rights of any government representative found to be in breach of Article 7 at the Council of the European Union. The mechanism is described as a “last resort”, but does potentially provide leverage where states fail to uphold their duty to protect freedom of expression.
Yet within the EU, some remained concerned that the use of Article 7 of the Treaty, while a step forward, is limited in its effectiveness because it is only used as a last resort. Among those who argued this were Commissioner Reding, who called the mechanism the “nuclear option” during a speech addressing the “Copenhagen Dilemma” (the problem of holding states to the human rights commitments they make when they join). In March 2013, in a joint letter sent to Commission President Barroso, the foreign ministers of the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark and Germany called for the creation of a mechanism to safeguard principles such as democracy, human rights and the rule of law. The letter argued there should be an option to cut EU funding for countries that breach their human rights commitments.
It is clear that there is a fair amount of thinking going on internally within the Commission on what to do when member states fail to abide by “European values”. Commission President Barroso raised this in his State of the Union address in September 2012, explicitly calling for “a better developed set of instruments” to deal with threats to these rights.
This thinking has been triggered by recent events in Hungary and Italy, as well as the ongoing issue of corruption in Bulgaria and Romania, which points to a wider problem the EU faces through enlargement: new countries may easily fall short of both their European and international commitments.
Full report PDF: Time to Step Up: The EU and freedom of expression
Footnotes
[1] Off-record interview with a European Commission lawyer, Brussels (February 2013).
[2] Interview with Prof. Andrea Biondi, King’s College London, 22 April 2013.
[3] Interview with lawyer, Brussels (February 2013).
24 Dec 13 | Comment, News and features, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture, United Kingdom
Human Right’s lawyer, Keir Starmer, who has just completed a five year stint as Director of Public Prosecutions for the Crown Prosecution Service, has been active in drawing up guidelines for sensitive areas of criminal law.
Starmer attended a recent roundtable of arts executives Index on Censorship organised with Tate Britain. It was part of our conference Taking the Offensive: Defending artistic freedom of expression in the UK. Having heard for himself that self-censorship in UK museums, galleries and theatres is widespread, triggered by a complex range of pressures including the fear of prosecution and police intervention, Starmer advocated for the usefulness of CPS guidelines for artist expression.
The story of how CPS guidelines came into being started shortly after Starmer joined the CPS as the DPP in 2008. It deals with one of the most morally sensitive areas of criminal law, that of assisted suicide. In the case of 23-year-old rugby playing student Daniel James, Starmer used his discretion not to prosecute Daniel’s parents for accompanying their son to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland, where he died with them at his side.
Subsequently, Debbie Purdy, who suffers from MS, approached the DPP to find out if her husband would be prosecuted if he assisted her suicide. Her argument was that if he would be prosecuted, then, in order to protect him, she would have to travel to Switzerland by herself while she was still physically able to make the journey. Effectively she would be shortening her life to avoid incriminating her husband. In response Starmer decided to draw up public facing guidelines laying out the factors the CPS would take into account to decide whether or to prosecute. There would undoubtedly be evidence against Mr Purdy to prosecute but would it be in the public interest to do so?
This year, Starmer drew up guidelines for the social media in response to a tidal wave of cases and excessive prosecutions arising from tweets and Facebook comments, including Paul Chambers’, the defendant in the Twitter joke trial. The guidelines indicate that the bar is set high – that only tweets that are “more than grossly offensive” and or “made in cases of considerable sensitivity” — should be prosecuted. Starmer quoted the case of a tweet left on the tribute page to April Jones, saying it would be likely to be prosecuted. The guidelines indicate that freedom of expression is well protected by the law, and the police are not going to get involved with every spate of offensive and abusive comments that litter the internet. As Starmer said – “you don’t need a law to protect expression that everyone agrees with”.
From a policing perspective the area of culture is uncharted. There is currently no guidance for policing cultural events, apart from a mention in Association of Chief Police Officers guidance regarding charging for costs associated with policing of music festivals and football matches. The job of deciding if a work could be in breach of the law – for example child protection, obscenity legislation, race and religious hatred or public order – is done by the police, without guidance. Compare this to the amount of guidance around policing of protest, where on every page the right to protest is repeated and stressed, and has to be taken into account at every stage of policing.
No DPP can reassure an anxious artist director that a particular piece of art work is not going to be prosecuted, though Starmer did receive several letters asking for that reassurance. But the CPS could produce guidelines for the arts and this is something that Starmer personally advocates, both as part of his general evangelism for the clarity and efficiency that guidelines achieve, and as a practical way to tackle self-censorship.
The guidelines would likely take account of the location and context of the artwork, the motivation and intention of the artist and how anyone involved in the making of the work had been treated, were permissions given, with particular scrutiny around the involvement of children and animals. They would also, and this would be very interesting part of the exercise, look at the public interest of prosecution, which would inevitably involve a debate about the wider social benefit of art that challenges taboos and pushes boundaries, including where offence is caused.
Taking the social media guidelines as a model, it is reasonable to assume that the guidelines would set a high threshold and that the legal framework would in the main support the artist’s right to free expression. This common law approach is one of several rulings in support of freedom of expression is cited:
“Satirical, or iconoclastic, or rude comment, the expression of unpopular or unfashionable opinion about serious or trivial matters, banter or humour, even if distasteful to some or painful to those subjected to it should and no doubt will continue at their customary level…” In Chambers v DPP [2012] EWHC 2157 (Admin), the Lord Chief Justice
If the guidelines were to similarly set a high threshold for artistic freedom of expression, it could go some way to dispel the fear of prosecution and it should give a clear steer to the police when dealing with art that causes offence. In turn this would clarify the position of the arts executives when work is contested by audience, press or police and enable them to better defend their choices in the heat of a crisis.
It would also mean that people making decisions about what art goes into our public spaces could differentiate between legal and social boundaries of what is sayable. The latter are more complex, mutable and volatile and in certain cases are patrolled by special interest groups, who actively want to silence artists whose work offends or challenges, often promoting the right not to be offended.
With the Common Law ruling in mind, arts guidelines as social media guidelines would not recognise the right not to be offended, though they do acknowledge that communication that is grossly offensive has in the end to be dealt with on a discretionary basis, quoting Lord Bingham “There can be no yardstick of gross offensiveness otherwise than by the application of reasonably enlightened, but not perfectionist, contemporary standards to the particular message sent in its particular context. The test is whether a message is couched in terms liable to cause gross offence to those to whom it relates.” This would seem to suggest that there is a right not to be grossly offended.
So in the end we have come full circle, back to that idea that each case has to be taken as individual, and that the DPP would be called on to exercise their discretion about whether to prosecute. But having said that the idea of guidelines is certainly very interesting and would at least put a clear line in the sand, in territory that is currently completely uncharted.
This article was originally posted at indexoncensorship.org
24 Dec 13 | News and features, Religion and Culture
Art is one of the most prominent forms of freedom of expression, allowing people to express their thoughts through song, dance, prose and theatre. It is not uncommon across the world for performers to be attacked as a form of censorship, ultimately silencing what they are trying to say.
Ala Yaacoub- Tunisian rapper, two years imprisonment
Tunisian rapper Weld El 15, real name Ala Yaacoub, was sentenced to two years in prison after posting a song online in which he insulted and threatened police.
Yaacoub, 25, told AFP that in the rap, entitled The Police are Dogs, he used the same terms that the police use to speak about the youth: “The police have to respect citizens if they want to be respected. I am afraid because in a country like Tunisia the law is not applied; you can expect anything.”
Some of those involved in the production of the music video for the rap, including director Mohamed Hedi Belgueyed and actress Sabrine Klibi, were handed suspended sentences of six months. Yaacoub was freed a month after his trial and given a suspended six-month term.
Tunisia was the first country to be hit by the ‘Arab Spring’ after which a moderate Islamist-led government was elected after the overthrow of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Since then there has been an increase in ultra-conservative Islamists, Salafists, who have been campaigning for greater public piety in Tunisia.
Aron Atabek – Kazakh poet, 18 years imprisonment
In 2007 Aron Atabek was sentenced to 18 years imprisonment following his involvement in a 2006 protest against an attempt by Kazakh authorities to flatten a shanty town; the protest ended in violent clashes and the death of a police officer.
Whilst in jail Atabek wrote poetry and prose relating to the clash which was later smuggled out of his prison and posted online. The authorities, not happy with this, sentenced Atabek to two years in solitary confinement, serving one year until November 2013. This type of punishment, in which he was watched under 24 hour video surveillance, was nothing new to the poet having spent two years in solitary confinement previously for refusing to wear a prison uniform.
Since leaving solitary confinement and returning to his previous prison Atabek’s family are still yet to have any contact with him.
Malian musicians- 12,000 singers and musicians banned from working
Islamic militants first announced a ban on music in the north of Mail in 2012; since then the ban has spread to nearly two-thirds of the country, a country from which artists such as Ali Farka Touré, Rokia Traoré and Salif Keita have witnessed global success.
After armed militants sent out death threats nearly 12,000 musicians found themselves out of work, with some facing exile, as instruments were destroyed and live venues shut down. The 2013 Festival in the Desert, a world famous Malian music event, was moved to neighbouring Burkina Faso and then later postponed due to security risks.
Fadimata “Disco” Walet Oumar was forced to flee as the conflict in Mali developed: “Life without music is not possible … I would rather die than never be able to perform, create or listen to music again in my life.”
The state of emergency has been lifted in the country and the Islamists driven out of the north of the country by the help of the French. But refugees returning to the country don’t yet believe that Mali’s problems are over.
Tunisian actors
Nineteen actors in the Tunisian city of El Kef were attacked by Salafist Muslims only to be arrested themselves by police under claims of ‘indecency’.
Whilst performing at a small theatre, to help raise funds for another venue that had been burnt down in an arson attack, the group of actors were attacked by the militant group. The performance, entitled “Guetlouh” (They Killed Him), was a tribute to opposition politician Chokri Belaid, who was assassinated in February by suspected Salafists.
The charge for indecent behaviour carries a sentence of up to six months imprisonment in Tunisia.
Lena Hendry
‘No Fire Zone: The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka’ was shown on Channel 4 in 2012, drawing in more than double the viewers of a 11pm broadcast despite the graphic content it showed. The ITN team behind the documentary went on to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Lena Hendry, on the other hand faces jail for organising a private screening of the documentary during a human rights event in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Hendry was charged on 19 September for her involvement in the screening of the documentary on 9 July 2013 under the Film Censorship Act 2002, in connection with the screening of a video which was not vetted and approved by the Film Censorship Board of Malaysia. If convicted she faces a fine of between $1,576 and $9,455, up to three years in jail or both.
The Magistrates’ Court scheduled a final procedural hearing for 17 March 2014, and set the trial dates for 31 March to 4 April 2014. Lena Hendry is bringing a High Court appeal challenging the charges.
23 Dec 13 | Volume 42.04 Winter 2013
In conjunction with the Cambridge Festival of Ideas 2015, we will be publishing a series of articles that complement many of the upcoming debates and discussions. We are offering these articles from Index on Censorship magazine for free (normally they are held within our paid-for archive) as part of our partnership with the festival. Below is and article by Samira Ahmed on how 15 years of multiculturalism and how some people’s ideas of it are getting in the way of freedom of expression from the winter 2013 issue. This article is a great starting point for those planning to attend the Faith and education: an uneasy partnership session at the festival.
Index on Censorship is a global quarterly magazine with reporters and contributing editors around the world. Founded in 1972, it promotes and defends the right to freedom of expression.
In 1999, the neo-Nazi militant David Copeland planted three nail bombs in London – in Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho – targeting black people, Bangladeshi Muslims and gays and lesbians. Three people died and scores were injured.
In response, the government awarded funds to local charities and community groups working on projects to build cohesion among the people that had been the targets of Copeland’s bloody campaign.
The intention was honorable, the impact underwhelming. According to Angela Mason, then head of Stonewall, the gay rights pressure group, the assumption was that all the people targeted by Copeland were “on the same side”. The truth as she sees it was that the government-funded projects exposed the uncomfortable reality that there were strong anti-gay prejudices among Muslim, Christian and black communities in Britain.
How realistic is it to expect a cohesive society could emerge from this kind of climate?
Today, the tensions between freedom of speech and religious belief remain acute – and they are systematically exploited by political groups of all stripes, from the English Defence League to radical Islamists who threaten to disrupt the repatriation of dead British soldiers at Wootton Bassett. The story consistently makes the headlines. The idea that there is an Islamist assault on British freedoms and values is widespread.
The Muslim campaign against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1988 was the crucial moment in all this. It forced writers and artists from an Asian or Muslim background, whether they defined themselves that way or not, to take sides. They had to declare loyalty – or otherwise – to the offended.
The results have been appalling, and not only in Britain. Most notoriously, the Somali writer and Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali had her citizenship withdrawn by the Dutch authorities just as Muslim expressions of outrage and death threats in response to her writing about Islam reached their peak.
In the UK, local authorities have been all too ready to cave in to pressure under cover of preventing community unrest, maintaining public order or resisting perceived cultural insensitivity.
Sensitivity to religious insult, too often conflated with racism, has frequently taken precedence over concern for free expression. In 2004 violent protests by Birmingham Sikhs led to the closure of Behzti, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play on rape and abuse of women in a Sikh temple.
But the problem is not always obvious. In September 2012, Jasvinder Sanghera, founder of Karma Nirvana, a charity campaigning against forced marriage, ran a stall at the National Union of Teachers conference, distributing posters for schools. She told the Rationalist Association: “Many teachers came to my stall and many said, ‘Well, we couldn’t put them up. It’s cultural, we wouldn’t want to offend communities and we wouldn’t get support from the headteacher.’ And that was the majority view of over 100 teachers who came to speak to me.”
Sanghera said that one teacher who did take a poster sent her photographs of it displayed on a noticeboard in his school. But “within 24 hours of him putting up the posters, the headteacher tore them all down”. The teacher was summoned to the head’s office and told: “Under no circumstances must you ever display those posters again because we don’t want to upset our Muslim parents.”
The delayed prosecution of predominantly Asian Muslim grooming gangs in Rochdale and Oxford has to be seen in the context of the long-standing local authority fear of causing offence. Women’s rights, artistic free speech, even child protection have repeatedly been downgraded in order to avoid the accusation of racism or religious insult.
It’s not as bad as it used to be, according to Peter Tatchell, whose organisation OutRage! promotes the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and has campaigned against homophobic and misogynist comments by Islamic preachers and organisations. “Official attitudes are better in terms of defending free speech but still far from perfect,” he says. However, he adds, “Police and prosecutors still sometimes take the view that causing offence is sufficient grounds for criminal action, especially where religious and racial sensitivities are involved.”
The pressure isn’t necessarily overt but individual writers say they are struggling to work out where the lines are being drawn.
Writer Yasmeen Khan’s work ranges from making factual programmes, including documentaries for BBC Radio Four, to writing and performing comedy and drama. She says: “The pressure not to ‘offend’ has certainly increased over the past few years,” though she adds that it has probably affected writers and performers outside a particular religion more than believers.
Being seen as a religious believer can be an advantage when it comes to commissioning or applying for grants, she says. “But the downside is that you’re sometimes only viewed through that lens; you don’t want to be seen as a ‘Muslim writer’ – you just want to be a writer. It can feel like you’re being pigeon-holed by others, and that holds you back as being seen as ‘mainstream’. I’ve seen that issue itself being used for comedy – I was part of an Edinburgh show for which we wrote a sketch about an Asian writer being asked to ‘Muslim-up’ her writing.”
Luqman Ali runs the award-winning Khayaal Theatre company in Luton. It has built a strong critical reputation for its dramatic interpretation of classical Islamic literature. He dismisses the assertion that political correctness has shut down artistic freedom: “There would appear to be an entrenched institutional narrative that casts Muslims as problem people and Muslim artists as worthy only in so far as they are either prepared to lend credence to this narrativeor are self-avowedly irreligious,” he says. He contrasts what he sees as the “retrospective acceptance” of historic Islamic art and literary texts in museum collections with “very little acceptance of contemporary Muslim cultural production, especially in the performing arts”.
In 2011, the TLC channel in the US cancelled the reality TV series All American Muslim, a programme about a family in Michigan, after only one season. The cancellation followed a campaign by the Florida Family Association that was reminiscent of the UK group Christian Voice’s campaign against Jerry Springer: The Opera in 2005. Lowe’s, a national home-improvement chainstore and major advertiser, pulled out of sponsoring the show after the group claimed the series was “propaganda that riskily hides the Islamic agenda’s clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values”.
Lowe’s denied its decision was in response to the Florida Family Association campaign. But amid the hysteria generated, including protests outside Lowe’s stores, ratings for the show plummeted. Many Americans decided not to watch it. As with Jerry Springer: The Opera, a small group had created a momentum of outrage that led to a fatal atmosphere of threat and intimidation around a piece of mainstream – and until then, highly successful – entertainment. The Bollywood thriller Madras Café was withdrawn from Cineworld and Odeon cinemas in the UK and Tamil Nadu, India, after a campaign by Tamil groups who found it “offensive”.
Veteran comedy writer John Lloyd, speaking at a British Film Institute event marking the 50th anniversary of the broadcast of the satirical news programme That Was The Week That Was in 2012, said there was now an obsession with “compliance” by tier after tier of broadcast managers, which he felt had suffocated satire. “Now,” said Lloyd, “everyone’s jibbering in fright if you do anything at all.” He contrasted the current climate to his experience working for Not The Nine O’ Clock News when, he said, he was “encouraged to provoke and challenge”.
Writer and stand-up comedian Stewart Lee, who co-wrote Jerry Springer: The Opera, is currently working on a new series of his award-winning Comedy Vehicle for BBC Two. He believes a general uncertainty about British legislation on religious offence is affecting what gets produced: “It’s all very confusing. I don’t know what I am allowed to say. There is a culture of fear generally now in broadcasting. No one knows what they are allowed to do.”
“In Edinburgh in August 2013, a (nonbroadcast) show in a tent funded by the BBC at 9.30pm saw the BBC person running it pull a song by the gay musical comedy duo Jonny and the Baptists about laws concerning gays giving blood because it ‘promoted homosexuality’. This at 9.30pm, in a country where it is not illegal to promote homosexuality, and not for broadcast.
“In series one of Comedy Vehicle, I had a bit on imagining Islamists training dogs to fly planes into buildings. This was pulled on the grounds that it appeared deliberately provocative to Muslims because of the dog taboo in Islam. I looked into this, and read a load of stuff on it. There is no dog taboo in the Muslim faith.”
A BBC spokesman said: “The band were invited to perform on our open garden stage which was run as a family friendly venue for the 24 days it was open to the public. With the possibility of children and young people in the audience, we asked the band to tailor their short set to reflect the audience. They did so, and in one of these, a late night notfor- broadcast show, their set included the song which Stewart Lee refers to. The BBC has a strong track record of offering comedians opportunities to perform their edgiest material without restraint during the festival and we will continue to do so.”
Lee described the Jerry Springer: The Opera debacle, explaining that the pressure group Christian Voice “were able to scupper the viability of the 2005-2006 tour” of the play by informing theatres they would be prosecuted under the forthcoming incitement to religious hatred bill if they staged the play. The bill was later defeated by one vote in the Commons, and soon after the House of Lords scrapped the blasphemy laws. “But,” says Lee, “I think the public perception is that both these laws still exist.”
He says he doesn’t like to make a fuss: “The BBC is beset on all sides by politically and economically interested partners who want to see it destroyed. I wouldn’t expect the BBC, any more, to go to the wall about something I wanted to say. I’d just say it somewhere else – on a long touring show for example – and get better paid for it anyway! I am also anxious not to appear to contribute to the notion that ‘political correctness has gone mad’. People say, ‘ah but you’ve never done stuff about Islam’. I have. Nothing happened. But I have not done stuff about Islam in the depth I have stuff about Christianity as it is not relevant to me in the same way.”
Lee says his writing for tours isn’t affected by the fear of offence because his solo tours are “cost-effective and largely off the radar of the anti-PC brigade or people looking for things to complain about”.
However, he says, when it comes to the television series, he does consider the power of offence. “It affects what I write,” he says. His new show addresses the Football Association’s objection to the word “nigger”. He suspects that the BBC might get cold feet about this bit. “So I will drop it and use it live and on DVD. I don’t see TV as the place to experiment with certain types of content any more.”
But he says that one of the most important things about freedom of speech is that it applies to everyone. “I don’t think a lot of the jokes that, say, Jimmy Carr and Frankie Boyle do are worth the annoyance they cause, but I would defend their right to say them.”
So what, if anything, has changed for writers and what they feel they can write about since his experience with Jerry Springer?
“It’s all much worse,” Lee says. “But for many reasons: lack of funding mainly.” In April 2013, culture secretary Maria Miller addressed members of the arts industry at the British Museum, arguing that: “When times are tough and money is tight, our focus must be on culture’s economic impact.”
But as Lee points out, “it’s harder to justify funding something worthwhile in the current climate if people are storming the publicly funded theatre, such as Behzti, in protest.” “It has lost its moral authority in many ways,” he says, adding that ratings are at the forefront of commissioners’ minds.
There have been high-profile attempts to link comedy and Islam, such as the recent Allah Made Me Funny international standup tours. The Canadian CBC sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie defied self-styled Muslim community leaders’ complaints about insult and offence to run for six highly-rated seasons, finishing in 2012. The BBC’s own Citizen Khan, which begins its second series in 2014, has similarly ignored claims of insult. Both sitcoms combine a Muslim family setting with very familiar sitcom themes.
In Britain, the overly cautious attitude to free speech and religion supposed to create community harmony has coincided with growing fundamentalist intimidation often promoted within enclosed immigrant communities. Sikh gangs have targeted mixed weddings in temples, and there have been tense stand-offs between Sikhs and Muslims over allegations of sexual grooming in Luton and elsewhere. British Ahmadiyya Muslims, who fled persecution in Pakistan, have struggled to draw media attention to the orchestrated hate campaigns being conducted against them by some Sunni groups. We need to feel free to criticise religious groups when they cross lines and commit crimes, without worrying about the cultural upset.
As Kenan Malik has said, the refusal to confront these issues in open and frank discussion, is “transforming the landscape” of free speech. Even in the United States, where free speech is enshrined in the constitution, there are serious questions being asked about what free speech actually means – particularly when it comes to religion.
The right to free speech should never be half-hearted. People have the right to be offended, but they don’t have the right to stop others speaking, discussing and debating ideas.
