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The state of freedom of expression and free speech in Europe has been a hot topic in the wake of Islamist terror attacks such as the murders at the Charlie Hebdo offices in 2015. In some countries, like Denmark and Sweden, it has shaped political discourse since the mid-2000s, when severe and credible threats from Islamists were aimed at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten for having published caricatures of the prophet Muhammed. A solidarity act in Sweden in 2006, where the party the Sweden Democrats republished some of the caricatures on their website, led to their website being temporarily closed down by a government minister.
Sweden and Denmark have once again become the centre of attention in Europe on the issue of freedom of speech in later years, owing to widely publicised activism from three persons in particular. Rasmus Paludan, a Danish-Swedish politician-turned lawyer, Salwan Momika, an Iraqi asylum seeker, and Salwan Najem, who we will return to later. All three were notorious for their many public manifestations in which they, among other things, burned and desecrated Qurans as protests against the religion of Islam, of which they were severely critical. All three were prosecuted for incitement against Muslims in Swedish courts for their acts.
But last week one of them was killed, and was as such not sentenced. Salwan Momika was murdered, despite living in a secret address due to the threats directed at him, by several men who invaded his house and shot him while he was livestreaming to his many followers. His eagerly awaited verdict, due to become public the next day, was not announced. But he had in effect already been sentenced to death for his desecrations.
This is one of the challenges that Sweden, and perhaps Europe as a whole, stands before. Can our governments protect those who are critical of Islam, from radical islamists who wish to exact vengeance? The other challenge is the way in which the legal term incitement is interpreted in the courts. Many scholars of law and lawyers have criticised the trials of both Rasmus Paludan and of Salwan Momika.
Paludan was sentenced in November 2024 for incitement against Muslims during manifestations against the Quran in 2022. The core of his sentence was not widely questioned – he had in fact levelled obscene claims and statements about Muslims as a group. This is in line with what the Swedish law against incitement prohibits. The problem was identified by prominent freedom of speech expert Nils Funcke as being that in the verdict, Paludan’s desecration of the Quran and statements about Islam (as such, not about Muslims) was seen as aggravating his verbal incitement, thereby indirectly outlawing disrespectful treatment of Islam and its scriptures. Funcke and other critics denounced the inclusion of these circumstances in the verdict as the return of blasphemy laws, which were abolished in Sweden in 1970.
Salwan Momika was not legally sentenced for his public Quran burnings, having been killed before the verdict took effect. However, Momika’s partner-in-activism who accompanied him on every manifestation, fellow Iraqi refugee Salwan Najem, was. In the court’s reasoning for finding Najem guilty of incitement they held him accountable for statements made by the deceased Salwan Momika, with the motivation that Salwan Najem had not distanced himself from them. Salwan Momika had, much like Rasmus Paludan, made obscene claims and statements against Muslims as a group. As such, the fact that Momika did incite against Muslims is not the fact that is disputed – the scandal is that a man who has not been demonstrated as doing anything but desecrate a Quran and voice his opinion on Islam has been found guilty of a crime. Again, Nils Funcke and other legal voices sounded the alarm about the return of an effective blasphemy law.
While most critics of the Salwan Najem case are confident the verdict will be overturned if it is reviewed in a higher court instance, the state that Swedish freedom of speech is in as of February 2025 is very precarious. Not the least because other critics of Islam may not be safe from extra-judicial acts of vengeance.