Ditch blasphemy law, says PEN chief

The president of English PEN (the UK arm of the worldwide writers’ organisation)  says the law of blasphemous libel is not only obsolete but contravenes our rights to freedom of expression under the European Convention on Human Rights.

Lisa Appignanesi (pictured below), writing in the Guardian, quotes the Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie, who said, “If there is a God, he certainly doesn’t need the protection of the British legal system. If there isn’t, he doesn’t need it either. There is therefore no excuse for preserving the offence of blasphemous libel and it should be abolished.”

She says freedom of expression has been challenged from “many sides” in the past few years, and uses as an example Christians’ objections to Jerry Springer: The Opera, which had a successful stage run and was then screened by the BBC. (Its creator, Stuart Lee, has since said that he’ll never do anything like that again, because the religionists’ whining could close it down and lose a lot of money.)

Appignanesi says, “The present environment combines a growing fear of causing offence with an all-too-frequent clamour – usually from self-appointed representatives of various groups – that offence has been caused.”

She also has a dig at the Muslim Council of Britain: “There is a certain irony, though one to be welcomed, in the Muslim Council’s current espousal of free expression, after the literature handed out in mosques was attacked for provoking hatred against gays and Christians.”