3 December 2014 : If you were to enter a KFC, say, and shout “Free
speech is under attack”, most of the diners would look up in concern –
and not just because you had disturbed their quiet contemplation and
mastication of one of the culinary delights for which we daily give
thanks to the late Colonel Sanders.
Everyone is in favour of free speech, in theory at least. And so
there is an almost knee jerk reaction when there are headlines, as there
have been in the last few days, about US Supreme Court Justices
weighing “limits of free speech over the internet”, or that the
“Malaysian Premier says Sedition Act will stand”, or whether the “no
platform” movement, which seeks to ban certain viewpoints from being
expressed in public, is stifling discussion. Any restriction, goes the
instinctive liberal response, is surely wrong.
Free speech advocates often appear to argue that there should be
virtually no limits at all and they point to the situation in the US as
the ideal. There the first amendment forbids Congress from making any
law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”. This sounds fine
in principle.
In practice, it means that hate speech is allowed. It
means that ludicrous claims that Barack Obama falsified his birth
certificate to show he was born in Hawaii, not in Kenya, have continued
to circulate, even after he released a copy of his long-form birth
certificate in 2011.Poll after poll shows that significant percentages
of the American populace believe this nonsense, just as around one in
five Americans think he is a Muslim. This is because when speech is that
free, the truth struggles to emerge.
That liberty extends to publishing highly libellous statements. A few
years ago, on the way to interview a leading liberal now in the US
Senate, I leafed through his latest book. I was astonished to come
across a passage in which he accused a well-known Republican of smearing
an opposition candidate as a paedophile. There are few graver charges,
and in Britain that person would have either sued and won – and the book
would have been pulped – or had to accept that it was true, and his
political career would have ended in disgrace.
The UK’s libel laws are often criticised for being restrictive. But
they ensure any writer, publisher or broadcaster thinks twice about
whether something is true or not before disseminating it, which one
might judge of greater service to the public than the US free for all.
There are limits not just in Britain but almost everywhere, and it is
entirely appropriate that those limits should reflect the cultures and
traditions of the countries in question. A 2013 report by the Doha
Centre for Media Freedom noted that “all of the GCC countries except
Saudi Arabia guarantee freedom of expression in some way. However, they
all contain a similar clause: ‘ … within the limits of the law’. While
at first glance this wording seems quite restrictive, the approach is no
different than countries with established press freedoms. In all
nations, laws and court rulings have created legitimate limits on the
power of the press.” And I have no doubt that most GCC citizens, like
most citizens of European countries, are quite happy with such a
balance.
It is within that context that one should see the recent move to
strengthen the Sedition Act in Malaysia, which has been a beacon of free
speech within the region. By contrast, in Singapore, a gathering of
five or more people can be designated an “unlawful assembly”. In
Thailand, the venerable intellectual Sulak Sivaraksa has recently been
sued under the country’s draconian lese-majeste law for questioning the
veracity of a story about a duel between an elephant and a king who
ruled four centuries ago. In Vietnam, dissident bloggers have been
detained, jailed and beaten. In Malaysia, on the other hand, such
critics thrive in the country’s online publications.
That is not going to change. The Sedition Act is going to be
strengthened to protect Islam, other religions, the Malay people and the
hereditary rulers from insult, and to guard against anyone proposing
secession for East Malaysia. Government supporters would contend that
the move is necessary to preserve harmony in a country in which the
majority race, the Malays, still control only 24 per cent of the
economy.
The debate will be over the implementation, just as it is in all the
other countries that have laws about what can and cannot be said and
printed.Returning to the headlines I referenced earlier, the case in
America is over one Anthony Elonis, who was jailed for posting horrific,
threatening comments on Facebook about killing his former wife,
slitting the throat of an FBI agent and the possibility of going on a
shooting spree at a kindergarten.
The US Supreme Court is now considering freeing him on the grounds
that his constitutional right to freedom of expression may have been
violated. That says it all. Unfettered free speech may be a dream for
some, but in practice it is a nightmare – as the former Mrs Elonis knows
only too well. If we accept that, then everything else is merely about
striking the right balance – and that should be a subject for calm
debate, not hysterical reactions and headlines.
Sholto Byrnes is a commentator and editor based in Doha and Kuala Lumpur
The National.
The National.
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