Monthly Archives: March 2012

The University of Cincinnati maintains a shockingly restrictive free speech zone comprising just 0.1% of the school's 137-acre campus. The policy, which was named FIRE's Speech Code of the Month back in December of 2007, quarantines "demonstrations, pickets, and rallies" to a tiny portion of campus, requires students to request permission to use the zone a full ten working days in advance, and threatens students with criminal prosecution for violations, warning that "[a]nyone violating this policy may be charged with trespassing." Because this public university isn't shy about enforcing its misguided and illiberal policy, it now faces a federal civil rights lawsuit. Last month, a political student group seeking to collect signatures from students across campus in support of a ballot initiative filed a First Amendment challenge against the free speech zone after being told by administrators that they were not even "permitted to walk around." The administration added, "if we are informed that you are, Public Safety will be contacted." Threatening to call the cops on civic-minded students who want to talk to their peers about politics sure seems indefensible, and now the University of Cincinnati has to answer for its policy in federal court. Photo Credit: Bearcat2011

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Greg Lukianoff: The 12 Worst Schools For Free Speech In 2012

25-03-2012 20:51 Overview of HR347 and Free Speech Zones and the ramifications to activism and protests.

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HR347 and Free Speech Zones - Video

Julian Assange. Photo: Reuters

Julian Assange says he wants to bring liberty back to the centre of Australian politics, using his Senate candidacy to defend free speech and the ''right of citizens to live their lives free from state interference''.

The WikiLeaks founder also plans to be a ''fierce defender of free media'' if elected to the Senate, using parliamentary privilege to break court suppression orders and other ''excessive constraints'' on free access to information.

In his first interview since declaring his intention to run for the Senate in the next federal election, Mr Assange said he ''could be described as a libertarian'' and nominated Australian Democrats founder Don Chipp and former prime minister Malcolm Fraser as political figures he admired.

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Mr Assange declared his priority was to campaign for greater openness in government, what he termed ''the politics of understanding before acting''.

He criticised Australian politics for the ''increasing levels of cronyism'' and ''the betrayal of the rights and interests of people by political insiders, operating in their own interests''.

Mr Assange confirmed to The Age that Prime Minister Julia Gillard's attacks on WikiLeaks, in particular labelling its actions as ''illegal'' - contrary to advice from the Australian Federal Police - directly contributed to his decision to embark on a Senate campaign.

WikiLeaks announced last week that Assange had decided to run for the Senate after it discovered that his detention on sexual assault allegations was not an impediment.

He has been under house arrest in the United Kingdom while he awaits a British Supreme Court decision on his appeal against extradition to Sweden to be questioned in relation to sexual assault allegations.

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Senator Assange's plan

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is planning to run for election to the Australian Senate. Picture: AFP Source: AFP

WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange says he would use a Senate seat to push free speech by using parliamentary privilege to break suppression orders and other "restraints on access to information by the public.

Mr Assange was speaking about an earlier announcement that Wikileaks had discovered he could run for the Australian Senate while under house arrest in Britain and that he planned to do so.

He told the Sydney Morning Herald he would protect "the right of citizens to live lives free from state interference''

According to Assange the Australian political system was dominated by insiders and cronyism and very few were actually working for the interest of the Australian public.

He pledged to promote more openness and which called the "the politics of understanding before acting".

Read more about Mr Assange's comments at the Sydney Morning Herald.

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Assange would use Senate for free speech push

Most people ignore genocide denial. Growing numbers of governments do not

While Ive argued in this column that free speech in the world is trending toward expansion, a position I still maintain, governments nonetheless display a mushrooming fondness for thought control when it comes to the darker side of human nature.

In a March 9 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley wrote that Western nations appear to have fallen out of love with free speech and are criminalizing more and more kinds of speech through the passage of laws banning hate speech, blasphemy, and discriminatory language. Turleys point was underlined this month, when, following the murder of three Jewish children and a rabbi in southwestern France, French president Nicolas Sarkozy proposed a law that would make it a crime to frequent websites affiliated with some hate groups.

Sarkozys proposed law is the latest in a string of edicts that limit free speech in the name of historical memory. Denying or downplaying the Holocaust is banned in France, Israel, Canada, Hungary, Germany, and Austria, among other countries. A 2008 Framework Decision passed by the European Union says that all EU states should criminally punish the act of publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivializing crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, with sentences as severe as one to three years in prison (although not all member states have followed the censorial order).

Speech codes demanding specific positions on historical events arent limited to Nazism, of course. Acknowledging that Turkish forces slaughtered over 1.5 million Armenians in the early twentieth century is a crime in Turkey, and France passed a recent law criminalizing the denial of this same massacre (although legal action has blocked its enforcement). Publicly denying the 1990s Rwandan genocide merits a prison term in that country. In February, the Chinese city of Nanjing cut ties with its sister city of Nagoya, Japan, because the mayor there openly doubted that Japanese soldiers massacred Nanjing civilians 75 years ago.

The general idea behind these measures is to ensure that current and future generations do not forget the crimes their ancestors endured. Yet the sky doesnt cave at the denial of genocide. Human beings are actually quite good at remembering mass murder. Indeed, as history progresses, we often become more likely to label genocide accordingly, despite attempts to call it otherwise. Americans or Europeans who cannot locate their capital on a map still know what the Nazi Holocaust was, who perpetrated it, and which minority group suffered most. The early twentieth century Armenian pogrom is widely acknowledged today, despite Turkeys efforts to eliminate it from the historical record. Even on a much smaller scale, in France, it is unlikely history will forget the four Jews murdered in Toulouse earlier this month.

For historians, denial of genocidedoes not raise any serious issue. Indeed, they can demonstrate easily the absurdity of the deniers arguments, Ludovic Hennebel and Thomas Hochmann wrote in the 2011 book Genocide Denials and the Law. [B]ecause the deniers contributions are void to the historical inquiry, most historians have concluded that although demonstrating the deniers falsehood is a task worth undertaking, it is preferable not to honor the deniers with a debate. The Streisand Effect applies to Holocaust denial, it seems.

That an EU-aspirant nation like Turkey and supposed democracies such as EU member states ban speech acknowledging or disputing historical genocide gives developing countries license to do the same. Rwanda insists its law [banning denial of 1994 genocide in that country] is no different to those in Europe outlawing denial of the Holocaust, The Guardian reported in January, as two Rwandan journalists who questioned events in the early 1990s appealed their respective prison sentences of seven and 17 years (they were also jailed for criticizing Rwandan president Paul Kagame).

Banning one form of speech for ostensibly noble reasons makes it easier to subsequently ban other forms of speech, evidenced by the fact that countries that banned Holocaust denial in time moved to ban broader denial of crimes against humanity. Laws dictating what mustnt be uttered are among the measures most antithetical to democracy. Efforts to mandate the memory of a countrys past can end up imperiling its future.

There is nothing democratically brave about protecting pleasant speech or banning unpopular speech; such actions flow naturally from a policy standpoint. Rather, [i]t is unpopular speech, distasteful speech, that most requiresprotection, renowned First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams has said. We draw far and wide the borders of permissible speech, and in the process we have to put up with a few crackpots. But we need not waste time criminalizing crackpot ideas. As John Milton once asked: Let [truth] and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?

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Denying Death