The European Court of Human Rights Does Not Deserve Its Name
by Saied Shoaaib, Gatestone Institute:
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) recently ruled that referring to the Islamic Prophet Mohammed’s marriage to a 9-year-old as paedophilia is “beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate.”
As Judith Bergman explained in the wake of the October 25, 2018 judgement, which was handed down seven years after “free speech and anti-jihad activist, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, was convicted by an Austrian court of ‘denigrating religious symbols of a recognized religious group'”:
“Sabaditsch-Wolff was ordered to pay a fine of 480 euros and the costs of the proceedings. The Vienna Court of Appeal upheld the decision… Sabaditsch-Wolff then appealed… to the European Court of Human Rights. She stated that her right to freedom of expression, safeguarded in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, had been violated.”
According to the recent ECHR ruling, Article 10 had not been violated. Furthermore, it stated that the Austrian court that convicted Sabaditsch-Wolff had “served the legitimate aim of preserving religious peace in Austria.”
Even more shocking than ignoring the whole point of freedom of expression by talking about “preserving religious peace” was the ECHR’s defense of the Austrian court for stating that that “child marriages were not the same as pedophilia, and were not only a phenomenon of Islam, but also used to be widespread among the European ruling dynasties.”
The problem here is the word “were” — as though child marriages in Islam are a thing of the distant past. In fact, such unions continue to be sanctioned by Muslim religious authorities in many countries across the world.
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