A Danish-Swedish politician who has protested Islamism by burning copies of the Qur’an in several European countries has gone on trial charged with “incitement against an ethnic group”.
Rasmus Paludan, the leader of far-right Danish political party Stram Kurs (Hard Line), is the first person to go on trial in Sweden in relation to Qur’an burnings.
He was also previously banned from entering the UK after threatening to burn a copy of the Qur’an in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. The threat was issued in response to news that death threats had been made against a 14 year-old autistic pupil at a local school who inadvertently caused “slight damage” to a copy of the Qur’an.
Blasphemy has not been a crime in Sweden since 1970, and the burning of religious texts is currently protected by a freedom of speech clause in the Swedish Constitution. However, in 2002, the Swedish parliament adopted hate speech legislation, which prohibits incitement against a population group – i.e., “an ethnic group or another such group of persons with reference to race, skin color, national or ethnic origin, creed, sexual orientation or gender identity or expression”.
According to Professor Thomas Bull, former justice of the Swedish Supreme Court, burning the Qur’an could be deemed criticism of the religion or its writings, which is legal, or it could be deemed hate speech, which is illegal. He explains:
“A person who burns the Quran, one can suppose, has an opinion that Islam isn’t a good religion, just as when people burn Bibles or if people burn flags to show criticism towards a country. It is a common way to show criticism against something, but it does not necessarily have to mean the type of hateful message that agitation against a population group requires. However, if done with the specific purpose of inciting specific Muslims, the action could be illegal and constitute hate speech.”
Charges were filed in Malmö district court for statements Paludan made in connection with a 2022 Qur’an burning in the southern Swedish city.
Speaking to state broadcaster SvT, Paludan, who has been interrogated by both Danish and Swedish police, said: “What I understand from the interrogations is that I haven’t said anything criminal; it’s about how others can interpret it. This makes it difficult for me to take a stance on what I said.”
Specifically, two statements Paludan made were interpreted by the prosecutor as a violation of Swedish law. The first was: “Freedom of speech means that you are allowed to say things that others in the country do not like to hear. And you can say it without others assaulting or trying to kill you.”
The prosecutor’s interpretation of this was that: “Muslims don’t like Western democracy and freedom of speech” – which is then in turn deemed to be offensive to the group (that is not explicitly mentioned by Paludan).
A second statement considered in violation of the law is that there could “be a problem” if someone “likes, for example, to use violence as a means of communication”, because “it is only God’s word that counts”. This statement, too, was interpreted as denigrating to Muslims.
On another occasion, Paludan explicitly pointed to Islam as a threat, suggesting that in the past, in places where Islam has taken over, that “makes it very uncomfortable to live there, because Islam makes it not particularly comfortable to live in places. Because Islam does a lot wrong, and there will be a lot of unrest and no harmony in those places”.
Paludan is also accused of racially motivated verbal attacks on “Arabs and Africans” at a public meeting in September 2022. During the event, he responded to an insult from a man of African descent who called him “skitstövel” [roughly value-equivalent to “bastard”] by telling him to “go home to Africa”.
The offended man – who has previous convictions for serious assault and violating women’s privacy and has served time in prison – has requested 60,000 Swedish kronor (approximately €5,200) in damages from Paludan.
Paludan denies all the charges.
In recent years, a string of Qur’an burning protests in Denmark and Sweden have prompted domestic debate over each respective country’s liberal freedom of expression laws.
They have also led to violence and terrorist threats from religious extremists as well as concerted violence and diplomatic coercion from the 57 member states of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which has worked to protect Islam from what they term “defamation” since the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1988.
In Baghdad, for instance, the Swedish embassy was attacked by protestors, and the ambassador was expelled.
Two Swedish tourists were killed in an Islamist terror attack in Brussels in October 2023, with Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo later confirming that the shooter “targeted specifically Swedish football supporters” in town for an international football match.
Sweden’s intelligence service, Sapo, in May suggested that Iran had begun using established criminal networks in Sweden as a proxy to target Israeli or Jewish interests.
Sapo have since accused Iranian intelligence of hacking into a text messaging service to send 15,000 messages to Swedes calling for “revenge against Quran-burners”.
Paludan’s burning of the Qur’an outside the Turkish embassy in Stockholm in January 2023 is also widely believed to have slowed Sweden’s passage to Nato membership. Following the January protest, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan remarked: “It is clear that those who caused such a disgrace in front of our country’s embassy can no longer expect any benevolence from us regarding their application for NATO membership.”
In an attempt to de-escalate tensions with the OIC, Sweden is now mulling over possible legal means for stopping protests involving the burning of “holy texts” in certain circumstances, citing security concerns. Faced with similar threats, the Danish parliament has acted more precipitously, passing a law to make burning the Qur’an a criminal offense subject to a penalty of up to two years in jail.
Book burnings are crude, deliberately provocative, and a poor substitute for reasoned debate – but as Jacob Mchangama points out for Unherd, “when conducted by private individuals, they serve as non-violent symbolic expressions intended to convey a message – the essence of free expression”.
In bowing to violence and diplomatic coercion, Denmark and Sweden risk setting a perilous precedent and allowing religious extremists and the OIC to establish as credible the idea that, even in liberal democracies, religions and their followers are entitled to special legal protection that trumps individual freedoms.
