Alain Bouldoires talks to Timothy Garton Ash about the survival of blasphemy laws in Europe, and calls for a ‘right to blaspheme’.

Free Speech Debate

Should Europe introduce a ‘right to blaspheme’?

Free Speech Debate (http://freespeechdebate.com/) is a global, multilingual website for the discussion of free speech in the age of mass migration and the internet. Ten draft principles for global free speech are laid out, together with explanations and case studies - all for debate. Prominent figures from diverse cultures, faiths and political tendencies are interviewed and asked to comment through video, audio and text. Individual users from across the world are strongly encouraged to take part in the online discussion. They can propose new case studies and suggest revised or entirely new principles. The project is programmatically dedicated to taking the free speech debate beyond the west and global north, into the east and south. The entire editorial content is carefully translated into 13 languages, covering more than 80% of the world's internet users, by native-speakers of those languages (mainly graduate students at Oxford University). Anyone can then contribute to the online discussion in these or any other widely used languages, and there is a facility to give a rough translation of every user-generated comment into most languages using machine translation. The website is actively moderated by, and the original content generated by, an international team at Oxford University, working under the leadership of Timothy Garton Ash. Free Speech Debate is a research project of the Dahrendorf Programme for the Study of Freedom at St Antony's College.

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Free Speech Debate