In 2021, the Irish government proposed a law criminalizing hate speech. Earlier, Irish politicians Mattie McGrath and Keith Redmond said hate speech laws were “secular blasphemy laws” in their failed attempts to fight back. [75] In 1985, the Law Commission (England and Wales) published a report entitled Criminal Law: Offences against Religious and Public Worship, which concluded that the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous defamation should be abolished without being replaced. On 5 March 2008, an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 was passed, abolishing the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous defamation in England and Wales. (The common law will be abolished, not repealed.) The Act received Royal Assent on May 8, 2008,[140][141] and the relevant section came into force on July 8, 2008. [142] [143] In November 2008, the Pakistani government appointed Shahbaz Bhatti as federal minister for minorities and gave him ministerial rank. Bhatti had promised that Asif Ali Zardari`s government would overhaul Pakistan`s blasphemy laws. [173] Pakistan actively supported the Organization of the Islamic Conference`s campaign to create global blasphemy laws. [173] Minister Bhatti was shot dead on March 2, 2011, in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan.
On March 19, 2014, Pakistan`s English-language newspaper The Nation conducted a poll of its readers, which found that 68% of Pakistanis believe the blasphemy law should be repealed. [174] Fortunately, here in Canada, it did not take any egregious prosecutions to convince the government to repeal our blasphemy law. In fact, it was made with relatively little fanfare. In 1696, a Scottish court sentenced Thomas Aikenhead to death for blasphemy. [138] The last charge of blasphemy in Scotland took place in 1843. [139] Article 147 is punishable by up to three months` imprisonment or a second-category fine (i.e. up to €3,800[89])) anyone who publicly insults religious feelings with contemptuous blasphemy, whether orally, in writing or by presentation. [90] In addition, article 429bis prohibited the installation of blasphemous material in places visible from the public highway. [91] The law went into effect in the 1930s after the Communist Party called for Christmas to be removed from the list of public holidays. [92] The last successful conviction under section 147 was in the early 1960s, when a student newspaper was fined 100 guilders for mocking the New Testament. [92] The blasphemy law complements laws against racial discrimination and incitement to violence.
[ref. If Canada wants to be a voice for human rights on the world stage and speak out against the abuses of these regimes (which we certainly should), it undermines our cause if our own laws admit blasphemy to be a crime. To this end, the repeal of section 296 sends a strong message. The conservative New Democracy government initially announced in November its intention to reintroduce the criminalization of blasphemy, with sentences of up to two years in prison,[1][2][60][61] but backed down after a national and international outcry. [3] The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France, which debated the issue of the blasphemy law, adopted on 29 June 2007 in Recommendation 1805 (2007) on blasphemy, religious insults and hate speech against persons because of their religion. This Recommendation sets out a series of guidelines for Council of Europe member States with regard to Articles 10 (freedom of expression) and 9 (freedom of thought, conscience and religion) of the European Convention on Human Rights. Humanists UK has welcomed the passage of a new law to repeal Canada`s 19th-century blasphemy laws. Canada joins several countries, including Denmark and Malta, in recently repealing their blasphemy laws.Ireland is also in the process of repealing its blasphemy law following a public referendum in October. Sections 295A and 298 of the Myanmar Penal Code are used to prosecute persons for blasphemy. [230] [231] Myanmar`s penal code has a common origin with the penal codes of Pakistan and India and other British colonies in the 1860 Penal Code. [232] [233] The offences are as follows: In 1966, the prosecution prosecuted writer Gerard Reve under section 147.
