Blasphemy law is dropped in Netherlands
By George Conger, Religious Intelligence
Blasphemy will no longer be a crime in the Netherlands, the Dutch government announced last week. On Nov 1 Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin said the country’s coalition government would repeal a 1930s blasphemy law in favor of strengthening the current anti-discrimination legislation.
Two of the three members of the centre-right government of Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende — the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) and the Christian Union (CU) — had balked at past demands made by junior coalition partner the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) that Netherlands scrap the Blasphemy law, but have now agreed to back Labour’s demand that religion not be given a privileged place above free speech.
The push to reform the blasphemy laws comes in response to heightened tensions with the Netherland’s Muslim minority. Criticism of Islamists and Islam by comedians, cartoonists, filmmakers and politicians has led to threats of prosecution for offending Muslim sensibilities.
In March, Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders released a 10-minute film, Fitna, on the internet in which he alternated verses from the Koran with footage of terrorist atrocities committed around the world. Muslim activists have called for Wilders to be prosecuted under the blasphemy laws for having argued that Islam was incompatible with personal freedoms and Western democracy.
MPs from the Dutch Labour Party had urged the coalition government to repeal the blasphemy law, arguing that religious fervor should not be permitted to squelch free speech.
Holland’s blasphemy law was introduced in the 1930s after the Communist Party called for Christmas to be dropped from the list of state holidays.
The last successful conviction under the law took place in the early 1960s when a student newspaper was fined 100 guilders for satirizing the New Testament. In 1968 avant-garde author Gerard van het Reve was prosecuted for writing a fantasy where he had intercourse with God, who had taken the form of a donkey. Reve’s conviction was overturned after an appellate court found that though the passage in question was blasphemous, his work did not rise to being “malicious and deliberately offensive.”
Since the Reve case, the law has fallen into abeyance. However, following the 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, however, the CDA and CU parties sought to strengthen the country’s blasphemy laws. The move backfired however as a majority of the 150 members of Parliament rejected the proposal, calling instead for a repeal of the law.
Van Gogh was murdered on an Amsterdam Street on Nov 2, 2004 by a Moroccan man holding Dutch citizenship. The motive for the murder lay in Van Gogh’s film, Submission, made with Somali-born MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The 10-minute film features veiled Muslim women speaking of the abuse they had suffered at the hands of their husbands and other male relatives.
Prime Minister Balkenende’s government said their call for a stronger blasphemy law had nothing to do with the van Gogh murder, but due to an increase in anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim incidents in the wake of the murder.
However, public and political opinion turned against the government’s perceived coddling of Islam, and it scrapped its plans to strengthen the law.
The political ground has shifted in the Netherlands in recent months, as the CDA and CU have dropped their opposition to the dropping the blasphemy law. Radio Netherlands reported that in scrapping the law the government was responding to concerns from MPs “that offering religious groups an extra layer of legal protection is outdated. As an alternative the cabinet is now seeking to strengthen anti-discrimination laws against groups whatever their background, thus taking the religious component out of the equation.”
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