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Last year, FIRElaunched the Free Speech Dispatch, a regular series covering new and continuing censorship trends and challenges around the world. Our goal is to help readers better understand the global context of free expression. Want to make sure you don’t miss an update? Sign up for our newsletter. 

Blasphemers face arrest, the death penalty, and assassination

• Iraqi refugee Salwan Momika, known for his well-publicized and controversial public Quran burnings, was  on Jan. 29 in Sweden. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson suggested “there is obviously a risk that there is also a link to foreign power” involved. Days later, a Swedish court fined and issued a suspended sentence to Salwan Najem, another Iraqi refugee who burned Qurans with Momika, who was  of incitement against an ethnic group. The similar charges against Momika were dropped in light of his killing.
• Greater Manchester Police  a man “on suspicion of a racially aggravated public order offence” for publicly burning a Quran and livestreaming the act in the UK. An assistant chief constable said police “made a swift arrest at the time and recognise the right people have for freedom of expression, but when this crosses into intimidation to cause harm or distress we will always look to take action when it is reported to us.” The arrest took place just two days after Momika was assassinated in Sweden.
• Labour Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner will establish a  to create a government definition of “Islamophobia.” Depending on the council’s definition, and how it will or will not be implemented by government agencies responding to Islamophobia, it could implicate UK citizens’ ability to speak freely about important religious matters. 
• Six men were sentenced to death for blasphemy in Pakistani courts late last month. All had been accused of posting   on the internet.
• Delhi police are  Washington Post columnist Rana Ayyub for social media posts sharing “anti-India sentiment” and insulting Hindu deities.
• Iranian rapper Amir Hossein Maghsoudloo, known by Tataloo, was  sentenced to death for blasphemy. He had previously been extradited from Turkey and sentenced to five years in prison before his case was reopened.

Comedy and art crackdown in India

In late January, a Delhi court gave the  for police to seize two paintings by famous artist MF Husain from the Delhi Art Gallery. A complaint against the paintings, which “depicted Hindu gods Ganesha and Hanuman alongside nude female figures,” alleged they “hurt religious sentiments.” (Around the same time, local police in Texas also seized paintings. Fort Worth police entered the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and  from artist Sally Mann’s Diaries of Home installation showing her children nude. ������ýapp�ٷ�, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas demanded an end to the censorship this week.)

FIRE demands Fort Worth police return artwork confiscated from museum

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Government agents storming into a museum and taking down art isn’t the sort of thing that’s supposed to happen in America. But that’s exactly what happened in Fort Worth, Texas.

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An even bigger media censorship controversy has bloomed since. In a recent episode of the YouTube show India’s Got Latent, comedian Ranveer Allahbadia joked, “Would you watch your parents have sex every day, or join in once and stop it forever?” To put it mildly, this did not go over well.

In the days following the controversy, numerous censorship threats emerged. Mumbai police have  panelists on the show, and they may be facing numerous  related to obscenity and insult. MP Naresh Mhaske  for greater regulation of online speech, and the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology is  “considering recommending that the laws around digital content be made stricter.” YouTube has acted, too, taking down the video after  a notice from the Information and Broadcasting Ministry.

This joke may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s a good example of how efforts to crack down on one incident of unpopular speech can balloon into a much greater censorship threat.

New laws governing speech from Israel to Pakistan to Australia

• Late last month, Israel’s Knesset passed a law  denial of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel “with the intention of defending the terrorist organization Hamas and its partners, expressing sympathy for them, or identifying with them.” Offenders will be sentenced to five years in prison. The bill is modeled after legislation criminalizing Holocaust denial.
• Pakistan’s new  governing online disinformation will punish intentional dissemination of material speakers have “reason to believe to be false or fake and likely to cause or create a sense of fear, panic or disorder or unrest.” Journalists protested the law, which will punish offenders with up to three years in prison.
• Australia  mandatory minimum sentencing for some violent hate offenses, but also for the use of hate symbols or displays, like a Nazi salute. The Law Council of Australia  to the changes, noting that “a person guilty of public display of prohibited symbols at a political protest would be subject to a mandatory minimum sentence of 12 months imprisonment.”
• Germany’s ban on “symbols of anti-constitutional organizations” is not new, but it certainly caught global attention last month. Police  they were investigating protest groups’ projection onto a Tesla Gigafactory of the word “Heil” and an image of Elon Musk’s  at President Trump’s inauguration rally, which police suggest violates the country’s ban on the Nazi salute.

Sorry, DeepSeek can’t talk about that

AI company DeepSeek joins the list of Chinese tools and apps gaining a greater global footprint — but its users have discovered there are many things DeepSeek won’t say. As we’ve covered in previous Dispatch entries, tech developed by or with Chinese companies tends to come with some serious speech restrictions, and DeepSeek is no different. When asked some common sensitive questions about Chinese politics and history, DeepSeek  this result: “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.” Sometimes users can even see the program produce an answer before deleting it. It will, however,  similarly sensitive questions about other countries’ histories.

A busy few weeks of charges and sentencings

• A Thai man already serving a record 50 years in prison on lese-majeste charges received yet another long  for insulting the monarchy in social media posts, bringing him to at least 59 years. Meanwhile, another activist received a two-year term on similar charges as well as Computer Crime Act violations for  from a protest.
• Malaysia is targeting its royal critics, too. A 42-year-old man must pay a fine or serve a six-month sentence after being found guilty of  “offensive and insulting” Instagram content about the monarchy.

From the UK to Germany to Singapore: Police are watching what you post

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Police detained a pro-Palestinian activist in London under the UK’s Terrorism Act for, as the arresting officer put it, “making a hate speech.”

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• A Shanghai court sentenced documentary filmmaker Chen Pinlin to three and a half years for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a  commonly used against critics of the Chinese government. Chen had released a documentary about the country’s 2022 “White Paper” protests.
• Police in India are  claims filed against politician Rahul Gandhi for “acts jeopardising India’s sovereignty, unity and integrity.” Gandhi accused the country’s BJP party of capturing all state institutions and said he was fighting against “the Indian state itself.”
• Moroccan activist Said Ait Mahdi was fined and sentenced to three months in prison on charges including defamation for  protests criticizing the government’s response to a deadly 2023 earthquake.
• Turkish authorities are in the midst of yet another  on civil society, with dozens of journalists, lawyers, and politicians investigated, arrested, or brought in for questioning by authorities in recent weeks.  
• Kazakh authorities  blogger and satirist Temirlan Ensebek for “inciting interethnic discord” in an old online post — but won’t say which one.
• The band Placebo’s Brian Molko has been  with defamation for “contempt of the institutions” in Italy after calling Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni a “piece of shit, fascist, racist” during a 2023 music festival.

Non-Crime Hate Incidents…in the U.S.? 

The Free Beacon released a  late last month about “Bias Response Hotlines” popping up in cities and states across the United States — and these hotlines share some similarities with the UK’s controversial treatment of “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHIs). 

In Maryland, for example, the attorney general’s office  on its website that “people who engage in bias incidents may eventually escalate into criminal behavior,” so “Maryland law enforcement agencies are required by law to record and report data on both hate crimes and bias incidents.” And in Philadelphia, authorities handling “” can ask for , including exact addresses and names of the alleged offenders, and officials will  “contact those accused of bias and request that they attend sensitivity training.”

Readers of the Dispatch may recognize some overlap with the UK’s problematic NCHI system, where police create records of NCHIs based on complaints from members of the public accusing individuals, who are often not informed, of legal but hateful acts. The NCHI system is extensive, and it caught global attention late last year when Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson reported being visited by Essex Police for a year-old X post. Multiple police departments handled the case, and at least one flagged it as an NCHI. 

For more about this and other recent debates about free speech in Europe, see my piece  from earlier this week on a 60 Minutes story detailing Germany’s speech policing and Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference.

Women’s rights activist facing long jail term released in Saudi Arabia

Let’s finish off with some good news. Salma al-Shehab, a 36-year-old mother of two and doctoral student at Leeds University, has been  from prison after more than four years, of which almost nine months were spent in solitary confinement. Al-Shehab’s ordeal reached a nadir in 2022 when an appeals court sentenced her to a  in prison for posting in support of women’s rights on social media. She used the internet to “cause public unrest and destabilise civil and national security,” among other alleged crimes. 

There are still some reasons to be concerned, however. Al-Shehab may still be restricted by a travel ban, and many unjustly imprisoned activists remain behind bars in Saudi Arabia.