Blog

Submission to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

15th June 2020

The UN’s Special Rapporteur on the protection and promotion of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, David Kaye, issued a call earlier this year for submissions on academic freedom to help him prepare a report for the 75th Session of the General Assembly in the autumn. The Free Speech Union submitted the document you can read below which, in due course, will be published on the website of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. This document represents the views of the Directors, but not necessarily the members of the advisory councils. The FSU is indebted to Professor Eric Kaufmann for helping to write this submission.

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Letter to Change.org regarding Posie Parker

15th June 2020

One of our members – Kellie-Jay Keen, more commonly known as Posie Parker – had a petition removed by Change.org on the grounds that information contained in her petition was “identified as hate speech”. The petition read: “Keep the dictionary definition of woman to mean adult human female.” This was in response to another petition calling for the Oxford English Dictionary to change the definition of woman to include “transgender woman”. Change.org claims to be a politically neutral platform that believes in free speech, yet it has taken down Posie Parker’s petition and left the other one on its platform where it has attracted nearly 35,000 signatures. We have written to Change.org asking them to reinstate Posie Parker’s petition, admit that they were wrong to remove it and acknowledge that saying a woman is an adult human female is not “hate speech”.

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Letter to Sheffield University Student Union about the free speech society

15th June 2020

In February, a group of students at Sheffield University tried to set up a free speech society, but when they applied for official recognition from the Students’ Union it was declined. The group appealed and won, but have now been told their society is a “red risk”. That means they must attend “risk assessment” training and cannot invite any speakers on to campus without first having to submit a list of prospective speakers to the Students’ Union three weeks ahead of time for “full and final approval”. (One of the co-founders of the society, Ewan Somerville, has written about the difficulties he and his colleagues have faced in the Telegraph.) The students are now worried that if they invite anyone controversial to speak, the Students’ Union will withhold permission. Two of them reached out to the Free Speech Union for help and, with the aid of the Legal Advisory Council, I wrote to the President of the Students’ Union, Jake Verity, copying in the Vice-Chancellor, reminding him that both the Students’ Union and the University have a legal duty to uphold freedom of expression and asking him to reassure me that he won’t withhold approval from any speaker the society proposes to invite except in truly exceptional circumstances and when legally permitted to do so. The letter was dated 2nd April. I finally received a reply on 1st May. You can read both my letter and Jake Verity’s reply below. The reply goes part of the way to meeting our concerns, but only part of the way, so I will be writing a follow-up letter shortly.

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Letter to Ofcom Following its Decision to Sanction ITV and London Live

15th June 2020

On April 20th, Ofcom, the broadcasting watchdog, reprimanded both ITV and London Live for comments made by Eamonn Holmes and David Icke about links between 5G technology and coronavirus. Holmes’s sin, according to the regulator, was to say on ITV’s This Morning that the theory linking 5G and coronavirus deserved to be discussed in the mainstream media, even though he agreed with his co-presenter that it was “not true and incredibly stupid”. Ofcom said that this view – the view that the theory deserved a public hearing – was “ill-judged and risked undermining viewers’ trust in advice from public authorities and scientific evidence” and could lead to “significant harm to the public”. (You can read the adjudications here.)

The Free Speech Union regards these decisions as highly inimical to freedom of expression for reasons that we have set out in this letter, which was sent to Ofcom on April 24th. During the coronavirus crisis, the state has substantially increased its powers and imposed restrictions on long-established liberties. However, no such restrictions have been placed by the Government on the right to free speech. In fact, it is vital that this right should be upheld so that the Government’s decision to impose wide-ranging restrictions can be scrutinised and challenged by broadcasters and others. We have asked Ofcom to withdraw these sanctions and issue a press release affirming the importance of free speech and assuring the public it will not seek to stifle the expression of dissenting views without strong and compelling reasons for concluding that such expression will cause harm.

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Reply from Exeter College and the Free Speech Union’s Response

15th June 2020

Professor Sir Rick Trainor, the Rector of Exeter College, has responded to the Free Speech Union’s complaint about the no-platforming of Professor Selina Todd on 29th February. You can see the FSU’s original complaint below, as well as Professor Trainor’s reply, the FSU’s response, and Professor Trainor’s reply to that. We are pleased the College took our complaint seriously and investigated it in good faith, and are generally satisfied with its response. But we have some reservations about the conclusions of the Complaints Panel, which we’ve set out in our response.

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Letter of Complaint to De Montfort University About Breaching the Speech Rights of an FSU Member

15th June 2020

A journalism student at De Montfort University and a member of the FSU alerted us to the fact that he was being formally investigated for bringing the University into disrepute after a left-wing activist made a complaint about him. He had got into an argument with this activist on Twitter over the prosecution of Daniel Thomas, a colleague of Tommy Robinson’s, for identifying the victim of a sexual offence. The student wasn’t defending Thomas’s behaviour, merely objecting to the fact that the left-wing activist was revelling in his prosecution, as if Thomas were a bigger criminal than members of grooming gangs convicted of sexual offences. Nothing the student tweeted in the course of this exchange was unlawful, nor was it in breach of any of Twitter’s rules. But following the activist’s complaint, the student’s department at De Montfort University decided to launch a formal investigation and, in short order, found him guilty and threatened him with expulsion from the University if he repeated the offence. This is a clear breach of the student’s right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as being contrary to the University’s own free speech policies and inconsistent with its legal duty to uphold free speech under s.43 of Education (Nº 2) Act 1986. The FSU was minded to mount a legal challenge immediately, but was dissuaded from doing so by the student. Instead, we have written to the investigating official and pointed out that De Montfort University’s behaviour is contrary to the law protecting freedom of speech, asked him to explain himself, and warned him that we will legally challenge any further sanctions that are imposed on our member. For a university to punish a journalism student for exercising his lawful right to free speech really is a scandal.

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