YEAR THREE LAW: Criminal Libel (Blasphemy)

Here's the detail on the issue we were discussing today about the case we were discussing today.

But this is archaic now. The law of criminal libel (blashemy) was abolished in 2008. This was partly because (the government said) the 2006 Criminal Justice bill had introduced the new crime of incitement of hatred against any religious or ethnic group (or indeed any identifiable group). The intention of the old blasphemy of law had been to prevent people saying or printing things that would be so upsetting to believers (in a more religious age) that it might cause a riot.

Thus all religions (including Islam) are protected in English law from types 'hate speech' or cartoons or any act that is design WITH intent just to cause the serious trouble. Therefore you could harshly criticise any religion you like under English law, so long as you can show the intention was to have a debate about that religion. This could even include bitter criticism of the religion to the effect that it is wrong, stupid, dangerous - so long as the sole intent is not to simply cause harm. So you would be protected if you wrote 'religion X is a load of rubbish and the people who follow it are stupid"but you could not say religion X encourages its members to kill babies and drink their blood, unless i suppose you could show you truly beleived that and were not just doing it to make people hate religion X.

These new 'hate' laws replace blasphemy and their use is controversial and difficult. One problem is that some extremist groups seem to want to be prosecuted under these laws to give themselves a veneer of being martyrs or heroic. Thus the people doing the bullying claim to be the ones who are being bullied - which is an all too familiar syndrome of course from the school playground upwards.