06-04-2011

At Copenhagen University, Institute for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies (ToRS) hosted an interesting and popular debate upon Hate Speech. Whether it should be banned or not seems to take a lot of think-tanking and brain storming. Two remarkable professors in their subject areas discussed the reasons and justifications for their claims. Eric Heinze, Professor of Law and Humanities, Queen Mary, University of London is against the Hate Speech Bans and Henning Koch, Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Copenhagen is for it. Through their points of view, they established firmly their ideas and opened to the discussion of the enthusiastic participants, who challenged the debaters with their inquisitive questions. To my modest thinking, such sort of debates will go on to contribute public awareness of different ideas.
The debate became even more challenging with the questions raised about the Freedom of Speech and Cartoon Crisis. Also the interesting and enjoyable examples were supplemented by Thomas Brudholm, Associate Professor (Minority Studies), who chaired the debate and made the environment very cordial. Here are the short summaries of the ideas from the debaters:

Erich Heinze:

Hate speech bans, too, are often formulated with reference to traditionally recognized categories, particularly race and religion. It might be expected that the same cumulative jurisprudence should therefore be applied to include sexual minorities, the handicapped and the obese.

Hate speech bans suffer from inherent flaws. They either promote discrimination by limiting the number of protected categories, or, by including all meritorious categories, would dramatically limit free speech. Minorities within longstanding, stable and prosperous democracies should generally enjoy all human rights, but should not necessarily seek the protections of hate speech bans.

Henning Koch:

The history of European union has repeatedly shown that the exercise of stigmatizing, ranking the other individuals as in doubt with negative identity or particular sensitive kind runs the risk of stepwise transforming itself the veritable process of dehumanization of such presence. And on the very unfortunate conditions, this may result, as we all know, of suppression, expulsion and persecution and ultimately when reaching a mental tipping point, leading into a necessary extermination through the logic. After all, such kinds are never going to change. Thereby the indisputable immutability of the others stability will cause to execute treat to the superior kind of human beings, which is us, gifted with the true surviving human values. The self-fulfilling prophecy, a recipe, for the self destruction of our civilization is fabricated.

Whether it should be banned or not, Hate Speech is going to take a lot of discussion, because there are still questions upon not what it is but where its limits are. When does free speech become hate speech? When should the words used be banned? Therefore, the debate in Copenhagen University helped us to do some brain rack in understanding the pros and cons of the banning the Hate Speech.

Ramazan Dicle