The Basic Law · Article 10 · The Pleven Law · Lex Åberg · Section 295A · The Citizenship Test · The Moving Definition
Free Speech and Hate Speech Around the World: What Fourteen Democracies Protect, What They Punish, and How the Definition Has Moved
Fourteen democracies describe expression as free, and no two of them mean the same thing by it. Their statute books show the definition of punishable hatred moving era by era: religious insult first, then race after 1945, then sexual orientation at the turn of this century, then gender identity within the last decade, and, after October 2023, new restrictions on pro-Palestinian expression in the states that built the older offences. Germany tests citizenship applicants on Israel’s right to exist; Britain recorded 12,183 arrests in 2023 under two communications statutes; Japan declares hate speech impermissible by statute and punishes almost none of it. The record follows, country by country.
Every state in this survey proclaims freedom of expression, and no two of them mean the same thing by it. The United States writes the right without an internal limit and lets its courts police a short list of harms. Germany writes the right and its limits in adjoining paragraphs of the same article. South Africa prints, in its constitution, the categories of speech the right does not cover. The category that does the work in most of these systems—hate speech—has no agreed definition in international law, a gap the United Nations records in its own strategy document, and its content in national law has been assembled one protected class at a time, in an order this report prints. What follows is the record as each country’s own texts, statutes, courts, and police figures state it.
The United States: the baseline
The American settlement is the subject of a companion report filed today, “Free Speech: What the Record Shows About What the First Amendment Protects, and What Other Democracies Do Instead,” and is stated here only as the survey’s baseline. The First Amendment contains no internal qualification and no hate-speech exception; the Supreme Court has held the unprotected categories—incitement to imminent lawless action, true threats, obscenity, defamation, fraud—to be a closed historical set, and has refused, in Matal v. Tam (2017), to let the government punish speech because it demeans: “the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’” Every other country in this survey made a different settlement: where the American instrument names a prohibition on the legislature, the others name a right and then the terms on which it may be limited.
Germany: the right and its limits, in one article
Article 5 of the Basic Law of 1949 grants the right and qualifies it in consecutive paragraphs. Paragraph one: “Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by means of broadcasts and films shall be guaranteed. There shall be no censorship.” Paragraph two: “These rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons, and in the right to personal honour.” The general laws include the Criminal Code’s speech offences. Section 86a punishes the display of symbols of unconstitutional and terrorist organizations with up to three years’ imprisonment. Section 130, the incitement offence, punishes whoever incites hatred against a national, racial, religious group or a group defined by ethnic origin, or attacks the human dignity of others by insulting or maliciously maligning them; its modern form dates to 1960. Section 188 gives persons in political life enhanced protection against insult; police statistics reported in 2026 counted 4,792 investigations under it in 2025, a record. The enforcement instance recorded in this paper’s companion report stands as the system’s exhibit: on November 12, 2024, Bavarian police searched the home of a pensioner who had reposted a meme calling the vice chancellor a “Schwachkopf”—a professional moron; the insult proceedings were later dropped, and the search was lawful under the governing texts.
Since October 2023 the German file has acquired a second subject. On November 2, 2023, the federal interior ministry banned the activities of Hamas and of the Samidoun network in Germany and listed the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” among the banned organization’s symbols. Public use of the slogan has since been prosecuted under section 86a and under section 140, which punishes approving of serious crimes, and the courts have not spoken with one voice: Berlin’s higher administrative court in 2023 upheld treating the slogan as a banned organization’s symbol; Bremen’s in 2024 held it no threat to public safety; trial courts have convicted and acquitted. Berlin police banned pro-Palestinian assemblies outright from October 11 to October 19, 2023. Citizenship law moved in the same period. The nationality reform in force since June 27, 2024 requires applicants to declare their commitment to the free democratic basic order and to Germany’s special historical responsibility for the protection of Jewish life; since July 1, 2024, the naturalization test has included questions on Jewish life, antisemitism, and Israel’s right to exist, and Saxony-Anhalt has required a written declaration acknowledging that right since December 2023. The interior minister who carried the reform, Nancy Faeser, stated its rule in one sentence: “Whoever doesn’t share our values, will not be able to get a German passport.” A state whose constitution forbids censorship thus conditions its passport on an affirmation, and prosecutes a slogan its own courts cannot agree is a symbol; the desk prints the two facts together because the German state filed them together.
The United Kingdom: a qualified right, and the arrest figures
Britain’s guarantee is Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, carried into domestic law by the Human Rights Act 1998, and Article 10 qualifies itself: the right “may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society” for, among other aims, national security, public safety, the prevention of disorder or crime, and “the protection of the reputation or rights of others.” The offences of stirring up hatred entered the law one ground at a time. The Race Relations Act 1965, section 6, created the first: incitement to racial hatred, with intent required. The Public Order Act 1986, Part III, restated the racial offences. The Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 added religious hatred, confined to threatening words and requiring intent. The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 added hatred on the ground of sexual orientation, in force from March 23, 2010. There is, in England and Wales, no stirring-up offence for disability or for transgender identity. Alongside the stirring-up offences stand the communications statutes: section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which criminalized sending a message that is “grossly offensive,” and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988. The Times, compiling freedom-of-information returns in April 2025, counted 12,183 arrests under the two statutes in 2023—about thirty-three a day—with fewer than one in ten of those arrested sentenced. Since 2014, police guidance has also required the recording of non-crime hate incidents, events in which no crime is alleged; the Court of Appeal held parts of that regime unlawful in 2021, and in March 2026 the government accepted that the system is not fit for purpose and will end it.
The two individual cases that frame the British record are both in this decade’s file. Lucy Connolly, a Northampton childminder, was sentenced in October 2024 to thirty-one months’ imprisonment for a post, deleted within hours, calling for hotels housing asylum seekers to be set on fire. Graham Linehan, a television comedy writer, was arrested on September 1, 2025, at Heathrow Airport by five armed officers, on suspicion of inciting violence against transgender people in three posts on X—under a body of law in which, as the writer himself noted, no stirring-up offence covering transgender identity exists in England and Wales. The Crown Prosecution Service took no further action in October 2025; the Metropolitan Police announced the same month that it would no longer investigate non-crime hate incidents; in July 2026 the force apologized to Linehan and paid him £25,000. Scotland, legislating separately, moved on a wider front: the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, in force from April 1, 2024, extended the stirring-up offences to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity, and variations in sex characteristics, with a maximum sentence of seven years; sex is not among the characteristics. Police Scotland logged more than 3,000 complaints in the Act’s first forty-eight hours. On the first day, the novelist J. K. Rowling published posts describing ten transgender women as men and inviting arrest if the posts were criminal; Police Scotland announced on April 2, 2024, that they were not. The same Act abolished Scotland’s common-law offence of blasphemy, unused for more than a century: one speech offence retired, and six grounds of another created, in a single statute.
France: the precious right, and the law of memory
Article 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1789: “The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.” The defining statute is the Law on the Freedom of the Press of July 29, 1881, still the governing text, and the abuses have been added to it by amendment for ninety years. A decree of April 1939, issued as war approached, first made it an offence to defame or insult a group of persons by their origin, race, or religion where the act was designed to arouse hatred among citizens. The Pleven Law of July 1, 1972—law no. 72-546, adopted unanimously—created the modern offences: incitement to discrimination, hatred, or violence, and defamation and insult directed at a person or group by reason of origin, or membership of an ethnic group, a nation, a race, or a religion; it also empowered approved anti-racist associations to bring prosecutions as civil parties, so associations, not only prosecutors, set speech cases in motion. The Gayssot Act of July 13, 1990 added the memory offence: it is a crime in France to contest the existence or extent of crimes against humanity as defined by the London Charter of 1945 and judged at Nuremberg. When Parliament in 2012 extended a denial offence to the Armenian genocide, the Constitutional Council struck the law down as a violation of freedom of expression; the Nuremberg-anchored offence stands, and the extension does not. In October 2023 the machinery met the newest subject: on October 12, the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, instructed prefects that pro-Palestinian protests, as likely to generate disturbances to public order, must be banned; on October 18, the Council of State held that prefects could not ban a demonstration solely on the basis of that instruction or of its support for the Palestinian cause, and that bans must be assessed case by case.
Ireland: the offence the voters removed
Article 40.6.1° of the Irish Constitution guarantees “the right of the citizens to express freely their convictions and opinions,” subject to public order and morality, and in its original 1937 text required that “the publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter” be an offence. The blasphemy limb survived into the statute book when the Defamation Act 2009 gave it a modern definition. On October 26, 2018, the Irish electorate voted on it directly: 64.85 percent approved removing blasphemous matter from the Constitution, and the Blasphemy (Abolition of Offences and Related Matters) Act 2019, in force from January 17, 2020, struck the offence from statute law. Ireland is the one country in this survey to have deleted a speech crime by referendum in this century. Its hate-speech statute is the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act 1989, which covers threatening, abusive, or insulting material intended or likely to stir up hatred against groups defined by, among other grounds, race, religion, and ethnic or national origin; its first conviction came in 2000, and sixteen cases were finalised under it between 2018 and September 2024. In 2022 the government introduced a bill that would have replaced the 1989 Act with wider incitement offences, including an offence of possessing material likely to stir up hatred; in September 2024 it announced that the incitement provisions would be dropped, and the Criminal Justice (Hate Offences) Act 2024, in force from December 31, 2024, confines itself to aggravated forms of existing offences and increased sentences where hatred is proven as a motive. The Irish sequence runs in both directions within six years: a speech offence abolished by popular vote, and a broader one proposed and abandoned by the government that proposed it.
The Netherlands: a question asked at a rally
Article 7 of the Dutch constitution forbids prior restraint: no one requires prior permission to publish thoughts or sentiments through the press, “without prejudice to the responsibility of every person under the law.” The responsibility is codified in articles 137c and 137d of the Criminal Code. Article 137c, group insult, entered the code in 1934, prohibiting public expression offensive to a group of the population; in 1971, as the Netherlands implemented the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, it was recast around race, religion, and philosophy of life, and article 137d added incitement to hatred, discrimination, or violence; the grounds in the current text include heterosexual and homosexual orientation and disability, and, in 137d, gender. The defendant who defines the law’s reach is the country’s most successful politician of the present decade. Geert Wilders, leader of the Party for Freedom, was acquitted in 2011 of group insult and incitement over statements about Islam. On the night of March 19, 2014, at a rally in The Hague, he asked his supporters whether they wanted, in their city and their country, “more or fewer Moroccans”; the crowd, prompted, chanted “fewer,” and he answered, “Well, we’ll take care of that.” On December 9, 2016, The Hague district court convicted him of group insult and incitement to discrimination for the rally remarks. It imposed no punishment. The court of appeal in 2020 upheld the group-insult conviction and set the incitement conviction aside; the Supreme Court upheld the result on July 6, 2021. A question call-and-response at a campaign rally, adjudicated for seven years through three courts, ending in a conviction with no penalty: the Dutch record states both the prohibition and its measure in the same case.
Sweden: the law named for its first defendant
Swedish expression is protected by two constitutional instruments, the Freedom of the Press Act of 1949 and the Fundamental Law on Freedom of Expression of 1991. The hate-speech offence sits in chapter 16, section 8 of the Penal Code: agitation against a population group—hets mot folkgrupp. It is among Europe’s oldest, enacted in 1948 and known for years by the name of the man it was written to reach: Einar Åberg, a bookseller whose antisemitic pamphlets, distributed internationally, had drawn protests to Swedish missions abroad. The press called the statute Lex Åberg; Åberg was its first convict. The 1948 text covered origin and creed; race, skin colour, and national and ethnic origin were named in 1970; sexuality was added in 2002; gender identity or expression in 2018. The law’s present operation was fixed in the Quran-burning cases. Through 2023, police granted permits for public Quran desecrations under the constitutional instruments, while the government raised the national terror-threat level in August 2023 citing, among other causes, the burnings and the reaction to them. Prosecutors then charged under the 1948 statute. Rasmus Paludan, who had burned Qurans across Sweden, was convicted of agitation in November 2024 and sentenced to four months’ imprisonment. Salwan Momika, an Iraqi asylum seeker whose burnings outside Stockholm’s central mosque began the sequence, was charged in August 2024 and shot dead on January 29, 2025, the day before his verdict was due. His associate Salwan Najem was convicted on February 3, 2025, on four counts, and received a suspended sentence and day fines; the presiding judge stated the court’s rule in one sentence: freedom of expression is protected in Sweden, but it is not “a free pass to do or say anything.” Sweden has never banned Nazi parties. The statute aimed at an antisemite in 1948 now punishes the desecration of Islam’s book, under the same constitution that protected the burnings as demonstrations; the courts have printed both readings, and both are the Swedish settlement.
Canada: the limits clause, and a list amended twice
Section 2(b) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication,” and section 1 subjects it to “such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” The Criminal Code’s hate-propaganda offences—section 318, advocating genocide, and section 319, publicly inciting and wilfully promoting hatred—date to 1970 and defined the protected “identifiable group” by colour, race, religion, and ethnic origin. In R. v. Keegstra (1990), the Supreme Court sustained section 319 by a vote of four to three under the section 1 analysis, upholding the conviction of a teacher who had taught antisemitic doctrine to his students. The list has been amended twice since, each time by a named bill that Parliament debated as a free-speech question: Bill C-250, passed in 2004, added sexual orientation, over objections, recorded in the debates, that sermons would be prosecuted; Bill C-16, which received royal assent on June 19, 2017, added gender identity and gender expression. A parallel provision, section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, was repealed by Parliament in 2013; the government’s Online Harms Act, Bill C-63, tabled in February 2024, died unpassed when Parliament was prorogued in January 2025. The Canadian record thus contains, at the same time, the Western world’s most fully litigated judicial defence of hate-propaganda law and a legislature that has once repealed a hate-speech provision and once declined to enact a larger one.
Australia: no right to quote, and a statute about offence
Australia is the only country in this survey whose constitution contains no general guarantee of expression. What exists is an implication: in Lange v. Australian Broadcasting Corporation (1997), the High Court held that the Constitution’s system of representative government implies a freedom of political communication—a limit on legislative power, not a personal right. The operative speech statute is civil. Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, inserted by the Racial Hatred Act 1995, makes it unlawful to do a public act “reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate” a person or group, where the act is done because of race, colour, or national or ethnic origin; section 18D exempts acts done reasonably and in good faith for artistic, academic, reporting, and fair-comment purposes. In Eatock v. Bolt (2011), the Federal Court found that newspaper columnist Andrew Bolt had contravened section 18C in articles questioning the Aboriginal identity of fair-skinned Aboriginal people who, he wrote, had chosen their identity for professional advantage; the court held the section’s words to require “profound and serious effects, not to be likened to mere slights.” The section still reaches the political class itself: in July 2026 the Full Federal Court dismissed Senator Pauline Hanson’s appeal against a finding that her social-media post directed at a fellow senator contravened section 18C. The criminal side of the system has grown by state increments, most recently New South Wales’s Crimes Amendment (Inciting Racial Hatred) Act 2025, creating an offence of intentionally and publicly inciting hatred on racial grounds. Australia’s settlement is the survey’s limiting case: no proclaimed right stands in the statute’s path, and the operative threshold in its best-known speech case is a verb the American doctrine nowhere contains—offend.
New Zealand: one prosecution in fifty years
The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 states the right in section 14—“Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form”—and subjects all its rights, in section 5, to “such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” The hate-speech law is two sections of the Human Rights Act 1993. Section 61 creates civil liability for published matter that is threatening, abusive, or insulting and likely to excite hostility against, or bring into contempt, a group on the ground of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins. Section 131 makes intentionally inciting racial disharmony an offence, prosecutable only with the Attorney-General’s consent and punishable by up to three months’ imprisonment or a fine of NZ$7,000. Religion is not a protected ground in either section. The offence, first enacted in the Race Relations Act 1971 and carried into the 1993 Act, has produced one successful prosecution in its history: a neo-Nazi pamphleteer, in 1977. Parliament repealed the offence of blasphemous libel in 2019. After the Christchurch mosque attacks of March 15, 2019, the Royal Commission of Inquiry recommended extending the incitement provisions, and the government in 2021 proposed offences reaching speech intended to “stir up, maintain or normalise hatred,” punishable by up to three years’ imprisonment. The government reduced the proposal in 2022 to adding religious belief to the existing grounds, withdrew it in early 2023, and referred the subject to the Law Commission; in June 2024 the Minister of Justice directed the Commission to withdraw hate-speech issues from its work programme. The file therefore records a law nearly never used, a repeal, an expansion proposed after a massacre, and the expansion’s abandonment by two successive governments of different parties.
Brazil: the court expands the word “racism”
The Constitution of 1988 protects expression in article 5, item IV—“expression of thought is free, anonymity being forbidden”—and, in item XLII, removes one subject from that protection in terms: “the practice of racism is a non-bailable and imprescriptible crime, subject to the penalty of imprisonment, in accordance with the law.” Law 7.716 of 1989 defines the crimes of prejudice of race or colour, and its article 20 punishes practising, inducing, or inciting discrimination or prejudice on grounds of race, colour, ethnicity, religion, or national origin. The reach of the word racism has been fixed not by Congress but by the Supreme Federal Court. Siegfried Ellwanger, a Porto Alegre publisher, was convicted under the statute for publishing antisemitic books, including works denying the Holocaust; his defence was that Jews are not a race and that his conduct, however offensive, was not the constitutional crime. In habeas corpus 82.424, decided in 2003, the Court denied relief: racism, it held, is a social and political concept, not a biological one, and antisemitism falls within it, carrying the constitutional consequences of non-bailability and imprescriptibility. In June 2019, in ADO 26, eight of the Court’s eleven justices held that homophobia and transphobia are likewise to be punished under the racism law until Congress enacts a specific statute, which Congress has not done. The Brazilian file is therefore a record of a single constitutional word doing successive work: written in 1988 with the country’s racial order in view, read by the Court in 2003 to cover the Jews, and read by the Court in 2019 to cover homosexuals and transgender persons—each extension accomplished by interpretation, in the name of a text that names none of the groups the later readings protected.
South Africa: the constitution names the exception, and cuts the statute
Section 16 of the South African Constitution of 1996 grants freedom of expression, including press freedom, artistic creativity, and academic freedom, and then provides, in subsection (2): “The right in subsection (1) does not extend to—(a) propaganda for war; (b) incitement of imminent violence; or (c) advocacy of hatred that is based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion, and that constitutes incitement to cause harm.” Sexual orientation is not in the list. The Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act 2000, section 10, went wider than the constitutional text: it prohibited words based on any of a long list of prohibited grounds that could reasonably be construed to demonstrate a clear intention “to be hurtful,” to be harmful or incite harm, or to promote hatred. The case that tested both texts began with a newspaper column. In 2008 the journalist Jon Qwelane published, under the headline “Call me names, but gay is not okay,” an attack on gay marriage. The Equality Court found the column hate speech. On July 30, 2021, after thirteen years of litigation, the Constitutional Court held the word hurtful in section 10 unconstitutionally vague and overbroad and struck it, reading the statute down to the constitutional standard of harm and incitement—and held, applying that standard, that the column did constitute hate speech, because it dehumanised its targets and incited intolerance against them. Qwelane had died before judgment was delivered. South Africa’s record thus runs against the direction of the other files in this survey in one particular: the country’s broadest hate-speech formulation was narrowed by its own constitutional court, in the name of the constitution’s speech clause, in a case whose defendant the same court held liable under the narrowed rule.
India: the feelings clause, 1927
Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and expression; article 19(2) permits reasonable restrictions in the interests of, among other things, the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the state, public order, decency, and morality. The word hatred does not appear among the constitutional grounds. The operative statutes are older than the Constitution and come from the colonial code. Section 153A of the Indian Penal Code punishes promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, or language. Section 295A is narrower and stranger: it punishes whoever, “with deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of any class of citizens of India,” insults or attempts to insult the religion or religious beliefs of that class. It was enacted in 1927, and its occasion is on the record. In 1924 a Lahore publisher, Mahashay Rajpal, published Rangila Rasul, a scurrilous pamphlet on the marriages of the Prophet Muhammad. Prosecuted under section 153A, Rajpal was acquitted by the Lahore High Court in May 1927: there was no offence of insulting a religion as such. The imperial legislature supplied the missing offence within the year, as section 295A. Rajpal was assassinated in 1929 by Ilm-ud-Din, who was hanged for the murder and is honoured in Pakistan as a martyr. India’s Penal Code was replaced in 2024 by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which carries both offences forward—promoting enmity as section 196, the religious-feelings offence as section 299. The Indian file is the survey’s clearest instance of a law written for one community’s outrage becoming general property: a provision enacted to protect Muslim feelings after a Hindu publisher’s acquittal is now invoked by complainants of every religion, against speakers of every religion, and its test remains the one written in 1927—not incitement, but feelings, outraged deliberately and maliciously.
Japan: guaranteed in full, punished almost not at all
Article 21 of the Japanese Constitution of 1947 is the survey’s most absolute text: “Freedom of assembly and association as well as speech, press and all other forms of expression are guaranteed. No censorship shall be maintained, nor shall the secrecy of any means of communication be violated.” Japan ratified the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in 1995 with a reservation against the article obliging states to criminalize the dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred. National law contains no general hate-speech offence. The Act on the Promotion of Efforts to Eliminate Unfair Discriminatory Speech and Behaviour against Persons Originating from Outside Japan—the Hate Speech Elimination Act, in force since June 2016, passed in response to anti-Korean demonstrations in the Kawasaki and Kyoto areas—declares such speech impermissible and assigns government the duty of education and consultation. The Ministry of Justice describes the Act, in its own guidance, as a law of principles, with no provisions prohibiting discrimination and no penalties. The single penal instrument in the country is municipal: the City of Kawasaki’s ordinance of December 2019, the first in Japan to attach criminal consequences to hate speech, under which a person who repeats prohibited discriminatory speech in a public place after a mayoral recommendation and a mayoral order may be fined up to 500,000 yen and have the facts, including his name, published. Japan’s file completes the survey’s range: the strongest constitutional language of the fourteen, and, beneath it, a national hate-speech law that its own administering ministry describes as carrying no prohibition at all.
The moving target, dated
The commission for this report put five propositions to the desk as questions. The record answers them as follows. A century ago, was anti-Jewish speech hate speech in law? No. In 1926 no country in this survey had a hate-speech offence of any kind; antisemitic newspapers, including Streicher’s Der Stürmer, published legally in the Weimar Republic. The legal category arrived after 1945, and its founding document is a judgment: at Nuremberg in 1946 the International Military Tribunal convicted Streicher of crimes against humanity, holding that his “incitement to murder and extermination at the time when Jews in the East were being killed under the most horrible conditions clearly constitutes persecution on political and racial grounds.” He was hanged on October 16, 1946, the only defendant executed for a career of publication. The statutes followed the judgment: Sweden 1948, Britain 1965, Canada 1970. Fifty years ago, was anti-gay speech hate speech? No. In 1976 no surveyed statute named sexual orientation; Canada’s hate-propaganda sections listed colour, race, religion, and ethnic origin, and homosexual acts themselves had been decriminalized in Canada only in 1969. The era’s speech law ran in the opposite direction, against homosexual expression, under obscenity and indecency provisions. Sexual orientation entered the lists at the turn of this century: Sweden 2002, Canada 2004, England and Wales 2010, Brazil 2019. Five years ago, was anti-trans speech hate speech? In some of the surveyed countries it already was, and in others it still is not. Canada added gender identity and expression in 2017, Sweden in 2018. England and Wales have no such offence as of this filing. Scotland created one with effect from April 1, 2024; its first public test, the Rowling posts, produced a police finding of no crime within a day. Four years ago, was anti-Palestinian speech hate speech—and what changed? No statute in the survey has ever listed Palestinians or any national cause as a protected class, and that remains true. What changed after October 7, 2023, was the subject of enforcement under adjacent laws: Germany treated the movement’s central slogan as a banned organization’s symbol; France’s interior minister ordered pro-Palestinian demonstrations banned before the Council of State required case-by-case assessment; Britain’s Home Secretary wrote to chief constables in October 2023 about the policing of pro-Palestinian marches and flag-waving. In July 2024 Meta revised its hate-speech policy to remove content targeting “Zionists” with dehumanizing comparisons, calls for harm, or denials of existence, on the stated ground that the word “in those instances often appears to be a proxy for Jewish or Israeli people.” And in Germany, is anti-Israel speech now outside the hate-speech net? The record runs the other way, on the German file printed above: slogan prosecutions, assembly bans in the capital, a declaration on the protection of Jewish life written into citizenship law, Israel’s right to exist placed in the naturalization test and, in Saxony-Anhalt, required of applicants in writing. Criticism of Israel remains lawful in Germany and is printed daily in German newspapers; the boundary of the lawful is being litigated, slogan by slogan. But a citizenship applicant in 2026 affirms more about a foreign state than an applicant in 2022 did, and a demonstrator in Berlin says less with legal safety. The movement, on the German record, is toward restriction of anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian expression, not away from it.
“Hate speech is violence”: the career of a claim
One proposition recurs across the surveyed countries’ debates, in forms ranging from a tribunal’s sentence to a platform’s policy document: that hate speech is itself violence, and therefore cannot be free speech. The desk prints its documented career, attributed and dated. Its first legal form is the Streicher judgment of 1946, in which words alone, published over twenty-two years, were held to constitute persecution—a crime against humanity—in the specific circumstance that the extermination the writer demanded was proceeding as he wrote. Its academic form is Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment (1993), by Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, whose publisher’s summary states the thesis in a sentence: “Words, like sticks and stones, can assault; they can injure; they can exclude.” Its scientific form appeared on July 14, 2017, in a New York Times essay by the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett: “If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech—at least certain types of speech—can be a form of violence”; of abusive speech she concluded, “From the perspective of our brain cells, the latter is literally a form of violence.” The answer appeared four days later in The Atlantic, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt: “Of all the ideas percolating on college campuses these days, the most dangerous one might be that speech is sometimes violence.” In Germany the claim circulates as a slogan of exclusion from the category of opinion itself—Hass ist keine Meinung, “hate is not an opinion”—popularized by Renate Künast’s book of that title in 2017 and carried since on banners at demonstrations and in official campaigns. Its institutional form is the United Nations Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech of 2019, which adopts a working definition—“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”—and records, in the same document set, that no international legal definition of hate speech exists; Secretary-General António Guterres states the strategy’s premise as a sequence: “Hate speech is an alarm bell—the louder it rings, the greater the threat of genocide. It precedes and promotes violence.” Its commercial form is Meta’s 2024 policy, applying the proxy reasoning above to a political noun. Against the claim, in the record, stand two kinds of document. The first is doctrinal: no statute in this survey defines hate speech as violence; the offences punish incitement, insult, defamation, advocacy, or the stirring of hatred, and the courts that narrowed them—South Africa’s in 2021, America’s in 2017—did so by distinguishing injury of feeling from harm in law. The second is the circumstance of the claim’s founding case: the one tribunal that punished publication as a capital crime did so while a genocide the publisher had demanded was in progress, a limiting fact every later use of the precedent carries with it.
The timeline
1789 — France’s Declaration, article 11, proclaims the free communication of thoughts. 1924 — Rangila Rasul is published in Lahore. 1927 — Rajpal is acquitted; India enacts section 295A. 1934 — The Netherlands enacts group insult, article 137c. 1946 — Streicher is hanged at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity committed by publication. 1948 — Sweden enacts agitation against a population group; Åberg is its first convict. 1965 — Britain creates the first stirring-up offence, for racial hatred. 1970 — Canada enacts its hate-propaganda sections. 1971 — The Netherlands adds incitement, article 137d; New Zealand enacts inciting racial disharmony. 1972 — France’s Pleven Law. 1989 — Ireland’s Incitement to Hatred Act; Brazil’s Law 7.716 defines the crimes of prejudice. 1990 — France’s Gayssot Act criminalizes contesting the Nuremberg crimes; Canada’s Supreme Court sustains its hate-propaganda law in Keegstra. 1995 — Australia inserts section 18C. 2002 — Sweden adds sexuality to its agitation law. 2003 — Brazil’s Supreme Court reads antisemitism into the crime of racism. 2004 — Canada adds sexual orientation. 2010 — England and Wales’s sexual-orientation stirring-up offence takes effect. 2016 — Japan’s Hate Speech Elimination Act declares hate speech impermissible, without penalties; Wilders is convicted of group insult in The Hague. 2017 — Canada adds gender identity and expression; Barrett’s “When Is Speech Violence?” and the Lukianoff–Haidt answer appear four days apart. 2018 — Ireland votes to remove blasphemy from its constitution; Sweden adds gender identity or expression. 2019 — Brazil’s Supreme Court extends the racism law to homophobia and transphobia; Kawasaki enacts Japan’s first penal hate-speech ordinance; the UN adopts its hate-speech strategy, recording that no international legal definition exists; New Zealand repeals blasphemous libel. 2021 — South Africa’s Constitutional Court strikes “hurtful” from its hate-speech statute; Scotland passes its Hate Crime Act. 2023 — In October, Germany lists the river-to-the-sea slogan among banned symbols, France’s interior minister orders pro-Palestinian demonstrations banned and is corrected by the Council of State within the week, and New Zealand withdraws its hate-speech bill. 2024 — Scotland’s stirring-up offences take effect; Germany’s citizenship reform puts the protection of Jewish life and Israel’s right to exist into naturalization law; Meta adopts the “Zionist” proxy rule; Paludan is convicted in Sweden. 2025 — Najem is convicted in Stockholm under the 1948 statute; Linehan is arrested at Heathrow and not charged. 2026 — Britain moves to end non-crime hate incident recording; the Metropolitan Police apologizes to Linehan.
The record as it stands on November 14, 2026, is therefore this. Fourteen democracies proclaim expression free; thirteen of them qualify the proclamation in its own text, in an accompanying statute, or by the absence of any enforceable right against the legislature. The offence that does most of the work, hate speech, is nowhere defined in international law and is defined differently in every capital in this survey, and its protected classes were admitted one at a time, in the order the decades supplied them: the believer’s feelings first, in the colonial code of 1927; race, in the shadow of the tribunal of 1946; sexual orientation, at the turn of this century; gender identity, within the last nine years. In the same period, Germany—whose Basic Law contains the words “there shall be no censorship”—began prosecuting a slogan, banning assemblies, and asking its prospective citizens to affirm the existence of another state. Each of these facts is stated by the country that produced it, in its own texts and figures. The desk has placed them side by side. The comparison is the reader’s.