Stop ideological censorship. Signatures from the president of the Republic of Poland

Representatives of the Center of Life and household and the Ordo Iuris Institute submitted more than 30 1000 signatures to the Chancellery of the president of the Republic of Poland under the appeal to veto the act on combating “the speech of hatred”. The introduction of this amendment to the Criminal Code may consequence in ideologically motivated restrictions on freedom of expression. The legislature passed the bill on March 26. The president has 21 days from receiving her to study a veto.

The President's Chancellery received over 30,000 signatures of citizens opposing the amendment of the Criminal Code. Ordo Iuris points out that present only a presidential veto can halt the regulation of freedom of speech under the pretext of fighting the alleged hatred speech. The bill was adopted by the Sejm on 7 March and the legislature passed it without amendment on 26 March.

Ordo Iuris notesthat the task leads to a violation of Article 54(1) of the Constitution of the Republic of Poland guaranteeing freedom of expression. Moreover, the extension of the catalogue of "protected features" to "sexual orientation" and sex ("sexual identity") may lead to a regulation on the anticipation of objecting to LGBT requests

As the Institute points out, the choice of specified protected features is arbitrary, unjustified and ignores a full scope of characteristics that could besides be the origin of adverse (‘hateful’) treatment. The ultimate Court pointed out in 2014 that "the addition of respective crucial grounds of discrimination in the proposed government does not exhaust all possible discriminatory factors, but for equally crucial factors specified as intellectual illness, AIDS, alcohol addiction or drugs, obesity, homelessness".

In the opinion of Ordo Iuris, the main nonsubjective of the task is to extend the catalogue of "protected features" to "sexual orientation" and sex understood as "sexual identity". The intent of combining them with “age” and “disability” is to hide the ideological nature of the task under the pretext of protecting the aged and the disabled.

– Pushing the notion of “hate speech” into the language of regulations and jurisprudence, as well as public debate, will only reduce it. The accusation of hatred speech will (and is already beginning to be) like a spell cast on an opponent to shut his mouth and destruct from further conversation – highlighted in the appeal to the President.

– As the experiences of another countries show, this regulation of freedom of expression will in fact cover only 1 side of the hot worldview disputes: the 1 defending man and his nature, respect for life, sexuality or matrimony – the petitioners note.

The appeal was besides supported by respective twelve representatives of the planet of science, politics and media – prof. Ryszard Legutko, Prof. Zdzisław Krasnodębski, Prof. Jan Żaryn, Prof. Ewa Budzyńska, Prof. Andrzej Nowak, Prof. Wojciech Roszkowski, Dr. Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, Bronisław Wildstein, Paweł Lisicki, Łukasz Warzech, Rafał Ziemkiewicz, Jacek and Michał Karnowski or Witold Gadowski.

Photo by Tomasz Daniluk/Ordo Iuris