Hate speech bills, rulings challenging European religious tolerance?
Recent “hate speech bills” and prosecutions of religious and political figures accused of discrimination in Canada and Europe may be evidence of “increasing intolerance in secular Western regimes,” writes religious-freedom activist Paul Marshall in the news service Religion Unplugged (March 31). In March, Finland's Supreme Court found former Minister of the Interior Päivi Räsänen guilty under a “War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity” statute for a booklet on homosexuality that she had authored two decades ago. Also convicted was her colleague, dissident Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola. While both faced fines and not prison sentences, the court also ordered that the book be banned and existing copies destroyed. Marshall writes that the Canadian House of Commons passed a revised hate speech bill removing the existing law’s protection for good-faith religious statements. “That same week, Monsignor Jakob Rolland, chancellor of the Catholic Diocese of Iceland’s capital Reykjavík, faced investigation for explaining Catholic teaching during a radio interview,” he reports. Räsänen’s case has received the most attention among religious-freedom activists and conservative Christians. She had chaired Finland’s Christian Democratic Party from 2004 to 2015 and was Minister of the Interior from 2011 to 2015.
Marshall writes that Räsänen’s booklet was no diatribe, providing theological arguments for the standard historical Christian view. That she had also posted in 2019 on Instagram a photo of a New Testament text critical of same-sex relations added to the prosecutors’ claim that she “threatened, defamed or insulted” gay and transgender people (although the court had previously acquitted Räsänen for her social media post, finding that merely citing a biblical text did not meet the threshold for a criminal offense). Marshall adds that Canada has not yet gone as far as Finland. Yet the country’s current Bill C-9, on “hate speech,” removes the existing religious belief defense in the current section 319(2) of the Criminal Code. “To get the votes of the strongly secularist Members of Parliament coming from Quebec,” he writes, “the governing Liberal Party has removed the defense in the original bill that no one will be convicted ‘if, in good faith, the person expressed…an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text.’”
Marshall argues that Finland’s Supreme Court decision, with similar trends occurring in Iceland and Canada, may “reach well beyond its borders.” The European Union’s Digital Services Act contains no Europe-wide definition of hate speech but instead requires social media platforms to conform to the definitions provided by individual member countries. The effect may be that “social media platforms can be pressured to conform to the Finnish court’s restrictive definition of hate speech, at least until another European state enacts an even more repressive rule. This effect goes far beyond the European Union,” Marshall adds. “The E.U. is seeking to compel American and other social media to conform to its Digital Services Act on the grounds that their content can easily be accessed in Europe.” This might mean that a person sharing a link to Räsänen’s booklet may be held to violate European law. “This would certainly be a stretch of the law, but stretching vague laws now appears increasingly common among European prosecutors,” he concludes.
(Religion Unplugged, https://religionunplugged.com/news/2026/3/31/a-turning-point-for-free-speech-finlands-conviction-of-pivi-rsnen-reverberates-beyond-europe)