Can a call for boycott ever amount to hate speech? In an era of deepening political divides, the question is increasingly influenced by geopolitics rather than human rights law: The Turkish government's criminalization of boycott calls in response to protests against political repression highlights the dangers of weaponizing hate speech laws, echoing a global double standard that undermines the universal application of human rights protections.
On 6 February 2023, the century-old Republic of Turkey witnessed the most horrific environmental catastrophe in its history. Despite the evident responsibility of the central government and local administrations in the exacerbation of the social disaster, a particular state institution and an affluent Sufi cult apparently sought to capitalise on the destitution of young earthquake victims. Such was the context of the two criminal complaints filed by the lawyer-led NGO “Children and Women First Association” (Önce Çocuklar ve Kadınlar Derneği). Theocratic practices in a constitutionally secular country like Turkey do not merely erode the rule of law, but also violate the rights of children as defined under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
On 21 April 1998, the then mayor of İstanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was sentenced to one year (subsequently reduced to ten months) in prison and a hefty fine by the State Security Court of Diyarbakır for “incitement to hatred and hostility on grounds of religious discrimination”. His criminal act was that of reading two provocative verses from the poem “Divine Army” by Cevat Örnek (“the minarets are bayonets, the domes are helmets / mosques are our barracks, the faithful our soldiers”) during a rally of the Islamist Welfare Party (of “Strasbourg fame”) in 1997. Twenty-five years after the aforementioned rally, Turkey experienced a free speech case involving another conservative-leaning political figure on the rise: on 14 December 2022, İstanbul’s mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu was sentenced by İstanbul’s 7th Criminal Court of First Instance to a term of imprisonment of two years, seven months and fifteen days for criminal defamation.
The precedent set by international human rights law and the case law of European constitutional courts allows the exceptional criminalisation of Holocaust denial. But the same “exceptional” treatment does not apply to other events which may or may not consist of a “genocide, crime against humanity or a war crime”. Thus, EU Member States struggle to strike a balance between their obligations deriving from international human rights law and those deriving from EU law.
In Turkey, Spain and Poland, lèse-majesté laws are weaponised against opposition: The conviction and imprisonment of Marxist rapper Pablo Hasél sparked mass protests across Spain, and the 20-year-old Wiktoria K. who shouted “f*** Duda” during last year’s demonstrations and received a guilty verdict on grounds of “insulting the President” in March 2021. The very existence of lèse-majesté laws poses a threat to the right to dissent. It is a vital democratic duty to cast such laws into the dustbin of history.
13. September 2025
Giovanni Capoccia
12. September 2025
Anne Peters
12. September 2025
Anne Peters