Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi: Should insults to religious beliefs be criminalised?

The Iranian lawyer and Nobel peace prize winner talks to Free Speech Debate about freedom of expression in Iran and whether insults to religious and non-religious beliefs should be criminalised.

Published on: January 20, 2012 with 1 Comment Print

Blasphemy Iran Law National security Power Religion Social media

Comments (1)

Automated machine translations are provided by Google Translate. They should give you a rough idea of what the contributor has said, but cannot be relied on to give an accurate, nuanced translation. Please read them with this in mind.

zargol February 9, 2013 at 5:24 pm
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In this interview, I haven’t heard any thing being said about religious and non-religious free speech in Iran . In fact, this is the most important problem that we have in Iran. Religion is the biggest taboo and I think we should get over it to be able to pursue free speech in Iran.

Highlights

Swipe left to browse all of the highlights.

				
								Peeing on Pétain
							
Eric Heinze examines the boundary between civil disobedience and desecration.  

								What is ‘dehumanising’ speech?
							
Eric Heinze provocatively argues that no-platformers need to look into the mirror and examine their own blind spots. 

								Glasnost! Nine ways Facebook can make itself a better forum for free speech and democracy
							
Free Speech Debate co-authors an Oxford-Stanford report on Facebook.

								‘Lenin-fall’: free speech and the politics of memory in Ukraine
							
O.T. Jones argues that the Ukrainian state should not restrict open historical debate but use its 'expressive' powers to foster a nuanced understanding of the past.

								Are you sitting comfortably? How safe spaces became dangerous
							
We must distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate safe spaces, argues Eric Heinze.

								Don’t blame news polarisation on the internet…it’s not the technology, stupid!
							
The internet does not guarantee polarised news, argues Richard Fletcher.

								Bridging the deep digital divide in India
							
Only 17% of rural India has internet access. But citizen journalism is giving voice to minorities says Arpita Biswas.

								Russia: ‘The Church has an enemy in every home.’ It’s television.
							
Helen Haft explains how the Orthodox Church has eroded freedom of the media and lobbied for the 2013 law against offending religious feelings.

								Are we losing the media we need for democracy?
							
Timothy Garton Ash discusses the importance of and whether we are losing the media for democracy at the General Editors Network Summit 2017 in Vienna.

								The internet alone will not set Africa free
							
Iginio Gagliardone explores the surprising technopolitics of two competing visions of the internet, US and Chinese, in Ethiopia.

								Freedom of speech in Japan and the Designated Secrets Law
							
Arthur Stockwin explains the four main areas where free speech is under threat in Japan.

								Israel, no-platforming – and why there’s no such thing as ‘narrow exceptions’ to campus free speech
							
Eric Heinze argues that it is contradictory to the principles of free speech to criticise the Israeli ambassador to Britain online and then no-platform him at a university talk.

Free Speech Debate is a research project of the Dahrendorf Programme for the Study of Freedom at St Antony's College in the University of Oxford. www.freespeechdebate.ox.ac.uk

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