Blasphemy Laws Are Back: Denmark Prepares to Ban Qur’an Burnings

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK - JULY 28: A Quran is burned by an activist from the small right-wing
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Oliver JJ Lane

“The unfree, medieval forces of the Middle East have won a victory today”, Denmark’s former immigration minister has said as the nation’s present government ploughs on to mollify criticism from the Muslim world by banning Qur’an burnings.

Denmark was the last Scandinavian country to still have historic blasphemy laws on the books when it scrapped its 334-year-old statute in 2017, but now the nation’s left-led government is bringing them back. A new law is being drafted, targeted at a surge in Qur’an burning protests recently which would make desecrating any holy book illegal, with the government saying the legislation is a matter of national security.

Minister of Justice Peter Hummelgaard spoke on the new law Friday, saying terror threats had increased recently and this was a reason to show more respect towards Islam, calling the wave of Qur’an burnings “meaningless insults which have no other purpose than to create discord and hatred”. The protests harmed the interests of the Danish state, he added.

According to reports the change in law will be achieved by amending the present rules which punish with up to two years imprisonment offences against foreign nations by publicly insulting them, including flag burnings. Consequently, Denmark proposes to punish burning all religious texts including the Qur’an and the Bible with prison time.

Denmark’s Radical Left party (Radikale Venstre) has said it will support the law, despite recently having said it was against new restrictions on freedom of expression. National broadsheet Berlingske reports Christian Friis Bach, one of their members of parliament, who said of the U-turn: “We had no desire to intervene until very recently… “But there have been over 100 Koran burnings in recent months with the sole purpose of creating discord”.

But exactly what constitutes “improper treatment of objects with religious significance” will be up for the courts to decide, the minister said, saying “only the imagination sets the limits” when it comes to deciding what is insulting conduct or not. At the press conference, questions by attending journalists seemed to tease out that burning a headscarf would not, while walking on a Qur’an would be considered hateful.

This vague approach has already set up a confrontation with Denmark’s law enforcement, who say they don’t want to be responsible for enforcing a contentious rule with no clarity on where exactly it applies. Denmark’s police union spokesman said in response that such a law would have to be as crystal-clear as road traffic regulations, saying “There must be no grey areas in the legislation. There must be clear boundaries that make it easy to enforce… It is a highly tense situation with very high political attention, and it is something that divides [opinions]”.

But that is not by far the only criticism of the new law from within Denmark. “I think this bill is hideous and shameful” says Mette Thiesen, MP and spokesman the Danish People’s Party reports BT. Rasmus Paludan, the anti-Islamification activist who has burnt Qur’ans for years to demonstrate the violent reaction as proof of the intolerance of some Muslim communities against Western freedom of expression reacted more philosophically. The paper reported him as having said: “I’ll probably find a way to criticize Islam. My goal is to demonstrate whether Islam is a peaceful religion”.

Perhaps the strongest criticism came from former government minister Inger Støjberg, who was the minister for immigration between 2015 and 2019, and now leads the opposition Denmark Democrats party in Parliament. She said the rule was a “1-0 to the Muslims” and that “Now the unfree, medieval forces in the Middle East have won a victory today. They can now see that they can dictate our way of life in Denmark, because we have a government that bows to threats and pressure”.

The law is too wide in its interpretation, she told Berlingske, saying it was unfair on the police to expect them to have to interpret it. “It is a reintroduction of the blasphemy clause. You just call it something else”, she said.

As also observed by law professor Frederik Waage and reported by BT, the changes being punished now are essentially rolling the law back to how it was before 2017, when Denmark’s historic blasphemy laws were repealed. When that law was repealed after 334 years on the books, every party in the Danish Parliament voted in favour of abolition except the left-wing Social Democrats, whose leader Mette Frederiksen is now Prime Minister, and whose Peter Hummelgaard is now the Justice Minister pushing the law.

The abolition was celebrated at the time for allowing “more free and unprejudiced discussion about religions” and promoting secularism, observing the law allowed religious groups to have “completely unreasonable” power over freedom of expression in Denmark. It was also observed that while the law banned attacks on all religions, for several years it had only ever been applied when it came to demonstrations against Islam.

Other nations that abolished their blasphemy laws as part of liberalising their societies are now, in the age of mass migration, looking to reverse that process and bring the laws back. Among them is Sweden, which abolished its last Blasphemy laws in 1970, having had various forms of them on the books since 1563, and amid demands from the Islamic world — including an attempt to blackmail Sweden into acting by withholding NATO membership by Turkey — it too is looking at bringing them back.

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