Cartoon Censorship: Rights, Dignity and the Endangered Art of Ridicule

Drawing on cartoon disputes from around the world, this paper aims to enrich the concept of censorship by explicating its various forms, ranging from censorship by the state to selfcensorship, as well as attacks triggered by the appropriation of cartoons for symbolic purposes never intended by the artist. In line with the theme of the conference, the paper focuses especially on cartoons that have been accused of being racist or otherwise undermining the dignity of particular communities. The aim is not to deliver definitive verdicts about whether these cartoons have indeed crossed an ethical or legal line, but to use these disputes as a window on unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable, dilemmas in media and communication. International human rights norms currently draw a distinction between incitement to objective harms like violence and discrimination, which do not deserve free speech protection; and, on the other hand, subjective offence against people’s feelings in the course of public debate, which must be treated as protected speech if does not cause any objective harm. But two very different lobbies—one pre-modern, the other post-modern—have advocated a redrawing of this classic liberal line separating offence and harm. The governments of many Muslim countries led an international campaign to recognise “defamation of religions” as an additional limitation on the right to freedom of expression under international law—a campaign that was energised by the Danish Prophet Mohammed cartoons controversy of 2006. More recently, American identity politics—perhaps in response to the spike in white nationalism that greeted the Obama presidency—has elevated the concept of microaggressions, which highlights the psychological harm arising from offence. Accordingly, cartoonists interviewed say that “political correctness” and a culture of offence-taking constitute a major—and in some settings, the main—obstacle to their work. Further complicating the issue is that censorship controversies can sometimes take on a life of their own. This paper argues that the most intractable of these disputes cannot be understood in literal terms. Laws have never only performed a protective or instrumental function; they also have a symbolic function, to affirm a group’s values by expressing its disapproval of some behaviour. Debates over censorship, similarly, are partly about asserting a group’s values as part of on-going identity politics. The most irreconcilable positions are what can be termed symmetrical or mirrored symbolic disputes, where both the pro- and anti-censorship camps are equally invested in their positions, for reasons that go well beyond the content of a cartoon.