UN Secretary-General António Guterres has announced plans for new “Global Principles” to “guide” governments and Big Tech, assisting them to “completely eradicate” what he defines in subjective and capacious terms as ‘hate speech’.
In a statement issued on the occasion of the “International Day for Countering Hate Speech” – an event established by the UN General Assembly in 2021 – UN chief Guterres said there is “no acceptable level of hate speech”, and called for its global “eradication”.
Guterres, a member of the Portuguese Socialist Party and formerly the country’s Prime Minister, acknowledged that the UN’s existing Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech (2019) provides a framework to tackle “both the causes and impacts of this scourge”, but appeared to suggest that this plan was no longer sufficient as it effectively requires member states to ‘opt in’ to receive UN support – something that hasn’t been happening as often as the UN Secretary-General would like.
“States have an obligation under international law to prevent and combat incitement to hatred and to promote diversity, mutual understanding and solidarity,” he said. “They must step up and implement these commitments, while ensuring that the measures they take preserve freedom of speech and protect minorities and other communities.”
Elsewhere, he made much the same point: “Governments, local authorities, religious corporate and community leaders have a duty to invest in measures to promote tolerance, diversity and inclusiveness, and to challenge hate speech in all its forms.”
Guterres then confirmed that to boost engagement with the UN’s Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech and ensure states are made aware of their responsibilities, the organisation is “currently preparing Global Principles for Information Integrity to guide decision makers around these issues”.
At first glance there might seem little to dislike about a proposal aimed at more effectively policing and sanctioning ‘hate speech’. But as free speech campaigners have long pointed out, one of the main problems with the UN’s approach is that it catches a variety of different subcategories of perfectly lawful expression and writes them off as ‘hate speech’.
At the hardest, most extreme end of the ‘hate speech’ spectrum sit forms of expression that incite violence or hostility against other persons and groups, and that is therefore prohibited under all major international and regional human rights treaties.
Beyond that, however, at the softer end of the spectrum, the term ‘hate speech’ becomes something of a legal misnomer, since what is being referred to are forms of expression that some people or groups may indeed claim to find insulting, upsetting, or offensive, but that nonetheless receive and warrant legal protection.
The introduction of this element of subjectivity into the policing of hate speech – the continuing elongation of the spectrum at its softer end, as it were – has not been entirely unintentional, allowing as it does for organisations like the UN to rearticulate what qualifies as ‘hatred’ in their own political interests, thus widening the net of applicability to various individuals and groups whose dissenting views on climate change, mass immigration, and LGBTQ+ issues are ideologically inconvenient.
In this context it’s worth noting that the UN’s Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech defines ‘hate speech’ as: “Any kind of communication in speech, writing or behaviour, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are, in other words, based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, colour, descent, gender or other identity factor.”
What terms like ‘attack’, ‘pejorative’ and ‘discriminatory’ mean is never explained.
Unlike any other internationally accepted definition of the phenomenon – excluding those developed by other UN agencies – this definition also severs the link between ‘hate speech’ and ‘incitement to violence’, potentially encouraging governments and Big Tech to sanction forms of speech and expression that do not reach the current threshold of criminality in most member states.
So what might Guterres’s soon-to-be-published “Global Principles” mean for the application of this definition on the ground?
Will a protest placard that states “Transwomen are not women” constitute ‘discriminatory’ language? If Christians take to social media to share their views on marriage and sexuality, will they be guilty of ‘attacking’ those who claim an eccentric gender identity for themselves or feel a particular sexual orientation? And what about situations, as in Ireland following the Dublin riots last year, where social media users identify the nationality of a suspected murderer – will they be accused of using ‘pejorative’ language against others who share similar national, ethnic or racial characteristics?
In fact, we don’t need to speculate on the basis of hypothetical examples.
The Finnish politician Paivi Rasanen’s recent, ongoing and now four-year long legal ordeal, in which she was charged under the country’s recently implemented hate speech laws for tweeting a verse from the Bible while challenging her local church for its decision to sponsor a Helsinki Pride event, already provides a worrying glimpse into the UN’s brave new world.
Plus, although most of the human rights organisations, charities, and NGOs that work with and alongside the UN are fairly coy when it comes to providing real-world examples of ‘hate speech,’ tucked away in the Council of Europe’s recent Study on preventing and combating hate speech in times of crisis is a subsection titled ‘Hate speech and the Russian Federation’s war of aggression against Ukraine’ that contains the following passage:
At local level [in Germany], though – especially in small towns or villages where refugees from Ukraine have been and are hosted – tensions have arisen, and law enforcement has been alerted in case of hate speech … according to the Society for Civil Rights, hate speech has started targeting refugees from Ukraine, also as a reaction to a recent ‘housing crisis’ in Germany. People in fact have started complaining that “refugees have better accommodation than our homeless people, than our poor”.
Is that hate speech that ‘attacks’ or uses ‘pejorative’ language against Ukrainians, or simply the expression of perfectly legitimate political opinion concerning the German’s state’s approach to territorial borders, immigration, and welfare provision?
