Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

moved Amendment No. 2:"After Clause 2, insert the following new clause—"    ““ABOLITION OF CERTAIN RELIGIOUS OFFENCES    The following offences are hereby abolished— (a)   blasphemy and blasphemous libel; (b)   any distinct offence of disturbing a religious service or religious devotions; (c)   any religious offence of striking a person in a church or churchyard.”” The noble Lord said: I beg to move the amendment introducing the first new clause. The atmosphere of consensus created by the debate on the previous amendment is very welcome. I particularly appreciated the remarks of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford, who said that there must be robust exchanges on questions of religion. I hope that that means that the Church is coming round to the view that blasphemy should, at last, be abolished. Although it is impossible to imagine that everyone on the Bishops’ Benches would agree with that proposition, if several do so it could be a weighty influence in helping the Government to make up their mind. It is the Government whom we have to convince to take this matter forward after today’s debate. The last time there was a prosecution for blasphemy in England was the Gay News case of 1976, when the editor of that newspaper was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment, subsequently lifted on appeal, for a poem that appeared in the paper. The arguments for abolishing the offence have been dealt with on many occasions in this House since then: in the Blasphemy (Abolition) Bill of 1995; in the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Bill of 2000; the Religious Offences Bill of 2002; in the Select Committee on Religious Offences, which spent a whole year examining the matter in 2003; in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill in 2004; and at Second Reading of this Bill only a few weeks ago. One of the main reasons for coming back to the proposal now is to make it clear once and for all that this Bill does not, and is not intended to, introduce a new statutory offence of blasphemy by the back door. Subject to this amendment being agreed to, one could say whatever one liked about the sacred entities or beliefs of a faith. There has been no response to the challenge that I issued at Second Reading to draft a form of words ““ridiculing holy objects”” that would be liable to prosecution under this Bill. I mentioned the Ship of Fools website which ran a competition to discover the 10 funniest and 10 most offensive religious jokes. The conclusion was that the Almighty was fair game and that blasphemy was a minority concern. The so-called jokes were indeed grossly offensive and some of them were undoubtedly blasphemous in law as well as according to ordinary English usage, but they would not make any sane person hate Christians. As long as the offence of blasphemy technically exists, however rarely it is used, there is confusion between incitement to hatred of believers and hatred of beliefs themselves. We have seen quite a bit of that already on this Bill. A new argument for getting rid of blasphemy is that it will help to make that distinction absolutely plain. There are several other reasons for abolishing this offence and your Lordships have considered them repeatedly. I refer particularly to the report of the Select Committee and, since it covers the arguments in some detail, it is necessary for me to summarise them only briefly. First, nobody can say with any confidence what is blasphemous, because the CPS and the courts may well take a completely different view today from what they did in 1976. When there was a public recitation of the James Kirkup poem, which had led to the Gay News prosecution, on the 25th anniversary of the case, the police took no action and there was no significant demand for them to do so. But the uncertainty of the law may itself lead to self-censorship or even actual censorship as it did in the Wingrove case, which is described in Appendix 3 of the Select Committee’s report. In that case, the European Court of Human Rights decided in 1996 that the British Board of Film Classification had not violated Article 10 of the convention on the basis that Lord Scarman’s speech in the Gay News case had fixed the definition of the offence in common law and that the restriction on freedom of expression was within the limited margin of appreciation accorded to member states in assessing whether the interference was for a pressing social need and was proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued. That aim was the protection of the right of citizens not to be insulted in their religious feelings dealt with by the court in the Otto Preminger case. The Select Committee concluded that the European Court had wrongly assumed that the House of Lords had clearly formulated the law on blasphemy in the Gay News case and it doubted whether the Court would have upheld the BBFC’s decision to ban the Wingrove video if the facts had been correctly argued before them. That shows that our blasphemy laws have continued to have reverberations in Strasbourg within the past 10 years and that the uncertainty may well lead to further expensive and divisive litigation in the future.