Abstract
In May 2024, South Africa’s Parliament gazetted the Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Act. The Act creates two new criminal offences: hate crime and hate speech. In this paper I am only concerned with the crime of hate speech. This offence is defined as follows: Any person who “intentionally publishes, propagates or advocates anything or communicates to one or more persons in a manner that [demonstrates] a clear intention to—(i) be harmful or to incite harm; or (ii) promote or propagate hatred” based on one or more of fifteen grounds— including birth; disability; gender or gender identity; ethnic or social origin; and sexual orientation—would be guilty of the offence of hate speech. Clearly the Act intends to protect persons who are particularly vulnerable to experiencing the harms of hate speech. As is typical with hate speech laws, some exceptions are granted for speech emanating from the arts, academia and the media. Atypically, this law also grants conditional exemption for religious speech. I argue that the exception for religious speech is legally flawed, irrational, unconstitutional and unethical. While South Africa is a secular state that guarantees religious freedom, I claim that legislators were wrong to grant religious groups special doxastic entitlements denied to those whose conscience, thought, belief and opinion are not based in religion. This is unjustified, arbitrary, prioritisation of religious belief over any other. It is clearly unfair discrimination on the grounds of belief, thought and opinion, and cannot be rational or constitutional.
Presenters
Kevin BehrensProfessor and Director, Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, Gauteng, South Africa
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Hate Speech Legislation, Limits of Religious Freedom, Doxastic Exceptionalism
