The UK’s Free Speech Paradox: Why Domestic Law Undermines Global Principle

The ongoing debate within the United Nations on hate speech, religious defamation, and Islamophobia reveals a profound conflict between two fundamentally different approaches to human rights: the universal, individualistic standards championed by the West and the conditional rights proposed by the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI).

1. The Core Conflict: Universal vs. Conditional Rights

The central point of contention in this debate is the question of legal supremacy.

Universal Freedoms (UDHR)

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) treats rights as inherent, non-derogable, and unconditional. Specifically:

• Article 18 (Freedom of Religion): Guarantees the freedom to hold a religion, practise it, and, crucially, the freedom to change one’s religion or belief.
• Article 19 (Freedom of Expression): Guarantees the right to seek, receive, and share information and ideas without restriction, “regardless of frontiers.”

These articles establish that religious beliefs and ideas, like political ideologies, must be subject to public criticism and robust discussion.

Conditional Freedoms (CDHRI)

The Cairo Declaration, supported by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), makes all stated rights subservient to a specific religious legal code:

• Article 22 (Expression): States that the right to express one’s opinion is only permitted “in such manner as would not be contrary to the principles of the Shari’ah.”
• Article 24 (Supremacy of Shari’ah): Declares definitively that all rights and freedoms in the CDHRI “are subject to the Islamic Shari’ah.”

The Result: This conditionality effectively allows religious law to supersede established international civil liberties. This subordination is the primary reason the Declaration has been consistently rejected by the United States and most European nations, as it violates the universality principle of human rights.

2. The UK’s Defence of Universal Freedoms at the UN

The United Kingdom has consistently acted as a key proponent of the Western position, using its diplomatic influence to ensure UN resolutions target individuals engaging in incitement rather than ideas subject to criticism.

The UK’s Consistent Position

The UK’s approach is founded on the principle that the international human rights framework exists primarily to protect individuals from the State, not to protect belief systems from public scrutiny or offence. This commitment translates into two key tenets:

1. Protecting Persons, Not Concepts: The law should criminalise violence, discrimination, or threats directed at people based on their religion (anti-Muslim hatred, antisemitism, etc.). It should not criminalise criticism of religious doctrines or practices, no matter how severe or offensive.
2. The High Threshold: Any restriction on free expression must meet the narrow, high threshold set out in Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)—only “advocacy of… religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence” can be prohibited.

The UK’s Stance Against the OIC (The 2023 Vote)

Following high-profile instances of Quran burning in Europe, the OIC tabled a resolution in the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) in July 2023 condemning the “desecration of sacred books.”

The UK government joined the US, Germany, and others in voting against this resolution. Their explanation of the vote focused on the danger of its broad language, arguing that it strongly implied that attacks on religious texts, by definition, constitute advocacy of hatred. The UK stated that accepting this premise would:

The UK stated

“introduce processes for blasphemy laws by the back door,” thereby restricting freedom of expression beyond the narrowly defined parameters of international law.

3. The Core Conflict: Defining the Threshold of Harm

The central, irreconcilable difference between the UK/Western human rights tradition and the approach championed by the OIC and the Cairo Declaration (CDHRI) lies in the fundamental definition of the threshold of harm required to legally restrict speech. This is the linchpin of the entire UN debate.

4. The Domestic-International Dissonance: The UK’s Internal Conflict

While the UK champions the high-threshold, pro-speech position at the UN, its domestic legal application demonstrates a significant tension, often blurring the line between protecting people from hatred and protecting religious sensibilities from offence.

While the UK champions the high-threshold, pro-speech position at the UN, its domestic legal application demonstrates a significant tension, often blurring the line between protecting people from hatred and protecting religious sensibilities from offence.

4.1. The Electoral Calculus and Political Motivation

The primary driver for this domestic dissonance is rooted in the electoral calculus of the UK’s two main political parties. The Muslim population is heavily concentrated in key marginal and contested urban constituencies across the Midlands and the North.

• Political Leverage: This concentration grants Muslim voters significant political leverage, transforming “community cohesion” from a theoretical administrative policy into an immediate electoral priority for the governing party.
• Response to Lobbying: Successful, decades-long lobbying by Muslim representative bodies (such as the Muslim Council of Britain) has effectively framed anti-Muslim acts, including public desecration, as a direct threat to community safety and dignity, demanding a robust police and legal response.
• The Motive for Low-Threshold Enforcement: The decision by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to pursue public desecration cases serves a core political function: it removes volatile catalysts for local disorder, demonstrates the government’s commitment to protecting the community, and addresses the political demands of influential voting blocks without technically reintroducing a statutory blasphemy law. The domestic enforcement of the low threshold is therefore a function of political expediency and the priority of vote security over the abstract international principle of free speech.

4.2. The Mechanisms of Dissonance

The UK’s core legislation aligns with its international commitment: the common law offence of blasphemy was abolished in England and Wales in 2008, and the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 requires the high threshold of intent to incite hatred.

The conflict arises when police and prosecutors use general public order offences to penalise acts of desecration or extreme offence:

• The Legal Workaround: Police and prosecutors use Section 4A of the Public Order Act 1986 to prosecute acts of desecration, such as the burning of a religious text. This requires only that the act (“abusive or insulting behaviour”) be done with intent to cause a person harassment, alarm, or distress (a Low Threshold), rather than direct incitement to violence (the High Threshold).
• Religiously Aggravated Charges: Crucially, the charges are often made religiously aggravated, using the offence against the religious text to demonstrate hostility towards Muslims, thereby securing a tougher conviction under the low-threshold POA.

This enforcement pathway—using general public order law to shield religious texts from highly offensive treatment—is precisely the kind of low-threshold restriction. The UK pushes back against when it is proposed by the OIC at the Human Rights Council, leading critics to argue that the Crown Prosecution Service is attempting to criminalise ‘blasphemy’ by the back door.