Paul Coleman is a British lawyer and executive director of the legal advocacy organisation ADF International (Alliance Defending Freedom). ADF and Paul Coleman have been supporting Päivi Räsänen, former Home Affairs Minister of Finland since she was investigated by police in 2019. She was criminally prosecuted for ‘hate speech’: for tweeting a picture of some Bible verses directed towards the national church of Finland after it became a sponsor of the Helsinki Pride Parade in June 2019; for writing a small booklet on marriage and sexuality for church members in 2004; and for discussing these issues during a live radio debate in December 2019. She was acquitted by a district court last year, but the prosecutor appealed and the court of appeal’s decision is expected shortly. Paul Coleman talked to us on the sidelines of the Demographic Summit in Budapest about the “chilling effect” hate speech laws all around Europe are having on society, the UK entering the realm of “thought crime” and “probably the worst” hate speech bill being discussed in Ireland.
Your organisation has been in the spotlight for the last couple of years because you represent the Finnish politician, Päivi Räsänen in court as she faces a hate speech trial. She was found not guilty last year by a district court, but the prosecutor appealed and the court of appeal’s decision is expected shortly. When can we expect a decision? What do you think the outcome will be?
We can expect an outcome by November 30th, but I think it will be sooner than that. Of course, we are hoping for a full acquittal in all of these charges. Päivi Räsänen is charged with three counts of hate speech, while Bishop Juhana Pohjola is charged with one count of hate speech. The district court a year and a half ago acquitted both of them of all of these charges, and in the last year and a half, the prosecutor hasn’t brought any new evidence or any new arguments. It is just a retrial of the first case. And so we hope for the same result from the court of appeal—that they will look at the case in the same way as the district court and uphold the fundamental right to freedom of expression.
So if there was no new argument by the prosecutor, is this just a kind of show trial?
The prosecutor in the Finnish system essentially gets to have another go. It is very unusual for me as a British lawyer and for people in other jurisdictions where this isn’t possible. The prosecutor must think to themselves: we tried to convict you, we weren’t successful, lucky us, we have unlimited state resources, we have unlimited time, so we just get to have another go. And even if the state fails in this second round, they will get another attempt at the Supreme Court of Finland, potentially, as well. And that is why I always say that the process becomes the punishment in these hate speech cases, because it has now been over four years that this has been going on, and while the state has unlimited resources, private individuals don’t, and the time and effort it takes to defend yourself against the state over such a long period is exhausting.
What happens if Päivi Räsänen and Bishop Juhana Pohjola are found guilty? Will you appeal?
Of course. If there is any guilty verdict, we will appeal it. And of course, we are hopeful that that won’t be the case, but we have to prepare for every eventuality.
Where would Päivi Räsänen’s case go after the Supreme Court: the European Court of Human Rights?
The case could only go to the European Court of Human Rights if there is a loss within the Finnish system for Päivi Räsänen or Bishop Juhana Pohjola, which of course we don’t want. But let’s say that somewhere along the line, either at the court of appeal or the Supreme Court, one of these charges sticks and there is no more appeal available in Finland, they could then take that to the European Court of Human Rights, and if it goes there, it will add on several more years to the whole ordeal.
How common are cases like these in Finland? In other words: did Päivi Räsänen’s case get a lot of attention because she is a well-known politician?
This is unusual in Finland as well, and the Finnish people are very surprised that it is happening. A lot of the people within the legal community are surprised as well. I’m not surprised. The case is just a more extreme example of what we have been seeing in Europe for at least a decade. The reason I’m not surprised is because Finland has these very vaguely worded, subjective hate speech laws, just like all other European countries. These laws allow for this sort of prosecution, because when you are dealing with vague concepts of hate and insult, these are hard, if not impossible terms to really define, and that means if you have an ideological police or prosecutor, then it can lead to cases like this. And so I think we will see more and more of these cases cropping up across Europe. This is just at the more extreme end of the spectrum that we have seen so far, but what is extreme now could become normal in a few years’ time.
How did we get to such a situation in Europe where governments deem it necessary to have these hate speech laws?
Honestly, I can’t give you a short answer to this question, but let me give you a few answers. First of all, there is a devaluing of freedom of speech in Europe and across the West. This is a trend that I think is very easy to track. Universities are teaching young people—Generation Z and millennials— that speech can be dangerous, speech is violence. So generationally, freedom of speech has been played down as a value that is a centrepiece of democracy. So that is one challenge. The second challenge is that the state—again, a consistent pattern across the West—considers it their role to protect people from offence, from insult, to protect minorities from harm, and they consider words to be harmful. And then more recently, the state has taken upon itself—again, across all of the West—to essentially be the arbiter of what is true or not. That is where we see the rise in misinformation laws and disinformation laws and laws against fake news. The state thinks that it should be the gatekeeper for what is true or not, and what we get to receive as information or not. There are many other factors as well, but these are some of the factors that are fuelling the global censorship trend that we are seeing.
In a commentary for The European Conservative, you wrote that “what’s happening in Finland may well represent just the beginning of what’s to come,” and “most European countries are actively pursuing more censorship instead of less.” In a YouTube interview, you said: “We are reinventing blasphemy laws in the West and we call them hate speech laws”. Which countries’ laws do you find particularly worrying? Are there any cases which you could mention?
It would surprise and shock Europeans to learn that on the statute books of almost all European countries there are these laws that are sitting there. It is just a question of whether or not they are going to turn into a situation like in Finland where this law has existed for a long time, no one really thought about it, and then it is being turned against the grandmother who tweeted a picture of some Bible verses. So there is nothing particularly bad about Finland’s law relative to other laws in Europe. That said, there is a trend where the array of laws that European countries have that limit speech is just growing and growing. Ireland is just the latest example where they already have plenty of laws censoring speech, but they want to pass a hate speech bill. The bill does not define hate speech, but they still want to criminalise it. It is probably the worst in Europe that I have seen so far because it is not just about speech itself, but what Ireland would consider to be being in possession of hateful materials. Päivi Räsänen is being prosecuted for writing a booklet twenty years ago on marriage and human sexuality. Imagine that same scenario in Ireland: it has not been put on the internet, it has not been published, it is just sitting in her basement, and the police come knocking at the door wanting to arrest her, for mere possession of it. This is being debated right now in the Irish legislative system, and it just shows how the boundaries of censorship are getting pushed and pushed all the time.
But in the end, it comes down to how the police, the prosecutor and the courts interpret these laws, right?
Yes, but the laws themselves are open to interpretation far more than we would want criminal law to be interpreted. All law gets interpreted to a degree—it has to. But I would say that with hate speech laws, the terminology within these laws is not only lacking definition, but it is undefinable. The concept of hate speech itself is ‘undefinable’ in law concept. I mean, what is the definition of hate speech? Most publications that write on this, the UN, the EU, the Council of Europe, will begin by saying there is no universally agreed definition of hate speech, because they know as well that these terms are so vague that they really can’t pin them down. So it is about interpretation, but the laws themselves allow for such a breadth of interpretation because they are so vague.
Are organisations like yours more and more in demand because of prosecutions for hate speech? Do you choose to intervene, or do people ask you to help?
Our caseload, unfortunately, is growing. We are the sort of organisation that shouldn’t have to exist, but we exist, and meet a problem, and that problem is growing in Western Europe, and all around the world. We are seeing more cases and more examples of attacks on freedom of speech, conscience, religion, and so forth. Our role as a legal organisation is to respond to that need—which is sort of, in a sense, reactive—but also to be proactive in how we can put forward positive solutions and how we can shape legislation as well in a positive way, where we can. So we are not sitting waiting for cases to come through the door. We want to be on the front foot, and be proactive in terms of how we can shape some of the legal culture as well.
Cases that ADF has been involved in include governmental efforts to ban people from praying in front of abortion clinics in Germany or police arresting people in the UK for ‘offensive’ tweets. The “perpetrators” in these cases were acquitted, so one could argue that everything is in order, and free speech is essentially not stifled.
We can’t say free speech wins with these acquittals. We will say free speech wins when people stop being prosecuted in the first place. It is all very well saying, hey, the charges were dropped, they are acquitted, what is the big deal? But that doesn’t take into account a few things. First of all, the process can take years in many cases, it involves tens of thousands of euros in defence costs, hours at the police station being interrogated. It is very easy for someone sitting at home to think, oh, it’s not that bad, they got acquitted. These people have probably never been through a four-year prosecution, because I doubt that they will say things like that if they have. The other problem with saying acquittals mean ‘free speech wins’ is it doesn’t take into account the chilling effect of the prosecution in the first place, and that by arresting people and questioning them at the police station, it is sending a message to everyone else: “You had better be careful what you say because you don’t want this happening to you.” So even if the end result is ultimately an acquittal, it has already had that chilling effect. And I would argue that that is a deliberate strategy. It is a deliberate strategy of those who want to censor, who want to go after high-profile targets. Whether they win or lose, doesn’t matter so much, because the process of bringing prosecution is a high-impact way of censoring a lot of other people.
In an interview, you said free speech is important because it is the free exchange of ideas between citizens, and without that, there is no democracy.
Yes, democracy and freedom of speech are really inseparable, they intertwine, and the extent to which you can have a legitimate democracy without free speech is highly questionable. So really democracy itself is on the line with this wave of censorship that we are seeing because if we cannot come together and freely exchange ideas then we have lost the essence of what a democracy is.
Leftists and liberals say the term cancel culture is just a conspiracy theory by conservatives. Is there a cancel culture?
Yes, I think that not only is there a cancel culture, but what we see with these cases and others is the effect of cancel culture. It’s not just about getting a tweet removed or getting into trouble at work—the effect of cancel culture in some of these cases is police knocking at your door, facing a criminal prosecution, and if that isn’t cancel culture, then I don’t know what is. And it is not just the conservatives—I think that a lot of people who we could consider classical liberals are facing the brunt of cancel culture too, we are seeing a lot of comedians, who would in no way shape or form be considered conservative, facing cancel culture. JK Rowling for instance. So it really is being targeted towards anyone who doesn’t go along with often a very vocal minority viewpoint on all of the hot-button issues of the day, related to, for example, sexuality and gender identity and so forth.
You mentioned the chilling effect of these police interrogations and legal ordeals. What was the most chilling case you’ve dealt with? Which was the one that made you think this cannot be happening in modern-day Europe?
We have already talked about the Päivi Räsänen case, but let me give you one example from my own country, the UK, of people who have been arrested for standing outside abortion facilities. The UK has such a long tradition of freedom of speech that in many ways it is part of our cultural and national identity, and so when we saw the video footage in December 2022 of Isabel Vaughan-Spruce being searched, arrested and taken away by multiple police officers on a pavement on a public street in Britain, it was hard to believe something like this was happening on the streets of Britain, and to find out that it was happening because she “might be silently praying in her head”. There was no sign of what she was or wasn’t doing, she was literally standing silently on the street, and that alone got her arrested. In the same way that the Irish bill being discussed crosses a line in terms of the mere possession of hateful material being an offence, the arrests of these pro-life people in the UK crosses a line because we are really getting into the realm of thought crime. It was not about anything that was expressed verbally, it was about the thoughts in her head, and to see police officers ask citizens what they were praying about, which we also have on video, is about as chilling as it gets.
