(Weekly Standard) An international human rights panel agreed with an Austrian court’s decision Thursday to fine a right-wing speaker for suggesting that the Muslim prophet Muhammad was a pedophile. This was, they said, a violation of the country’s statute that criminalizes “disparaging religious doctrines” in public.
The unnamed lecturer was first convicted by the Vienna Regional Criminal Court in 2011, after she was documented by an undercover journalist telling a general audience hosted by the Freedom Party that Muhammad “liked to do it with children” and asking aloud, “What do we call it, if it is not pedophilia?” After failing to win appeal in the Austrian Supreme Court, the petitioner brought her case before the Council of Europe’s human rights tribunal, the European Court of Human Rights, on the grounds that her punishment contravened the council’s article on freedom of expression.
