Joergen Ejboel
Chairman of JP-Politikens Hus (Denmark)

At the Center of the Storm

Thank you for inviting me. The only reason why I’m here is actually that I got an e-mail from Ronald Koven some months ago, and Ronald asked me if I could help to collect some money for WPFC to do a study about insult laws. I went to our two foundations and to TV2 and Ritzau and they came up with the money.

Normally now that I’m Chairman I would be behind the scenes. Normally it would be somebody else from the organization, but this is my fate.

I am basically, as the Chairman said, a journalist, working as a journalist ever since I was fifteen. I skipped school. I tried three times to get through high school with an exam. I failed all three times. And so publishing, newspapering, news, freedom of expression and so forth has been my whole life.

My priorities in life go like this, newspapers, magazines, books and my wife. And I wrote that in our financial report two years ago and my wife’s only comment was, “There are a lot of expensive dresses in Paris.”

Before going into the speech I would like to turn your attention to beautiful women. I don’t know if anybody will be interested in that, but I would like to introduce Mr. Rose’s wife, Natasha and her daughter, Anya.

Natasha herself is a great story, coming from the communist regime. She was at the time sitting at the Tass News Bureau massaging news. What would the Secretary General and what would Politburo like to see and read and what wouldn’t they like? So she knows everything about the free press.

Apart from that she is a great supporter of Flemming during the tough times. I didn’t suffer any tough times during the cartoon affairs, I must emphasize that, because I’m too stupid even to get personally involved in it. But of course Mr. Rose did suffer, still does, but he has the great pleasure to have such a beautiful wife, a clever wife, a tough wife.

Any terrorist or anybody else who would like to mingle with Natasha Rose will certainly want to give it some serious thought. So I received a brief e-mail asking if we needed some protection today because Mr. Rose was here and, of course, knowing his wife would be here, we certainly don’t need any protection.

Also, and this comes as one of the great facets of Mr. Rose’s personality, that Mr. Rose has simply decided on a personal level, not to bow to any pressure, any death threats, anything. So he’s moving around now in the world, of course taking special precautions just as anybody would do when you are traveling around the world. But he is, he should be a symbol, he should be an icon for a person who not only on a regular level but on a practical level is able to withstand the pressures that most people would bow to and simply leave the place and say, this is too much for me.

Before starting the speech then we should probably see these Mohammed cartoons just to be sure that everybody has seen them. I’m not trying to provoke or anything, this is just the cartoons that were so much spoken about. And when you look at the cartoons now in the aftermath of all these troubles, I’m sure that most people would say, was that all of it? But of course that’s up to personal taste as it is with all kinds of content in our publications. You can agree or disagree.

I mean when you look at the cartoons of your President, Mr. Bush, this is probably the most evil, demeaning cartoons you can see in the whole world. And still the poor man doesn’t protest. Maybe when he’s at home, but I mean he cannot protest to his electorate, because maybe they are gone.

So these were the cartoons and this is what the whole thing was revolving around.

And when I saw these cartoons the first thing in my morning paper, I think this was on a Friday morning, my first remark to my wife was, we must have a lot of cash in the company since we can publish that kind of rubbish.

I mean I’m being perfectly frank. And then I turned the page and then afterwards a lot of clever intellectual people, academics came and said, didn’t you know that it was forbidden to depict and so forth? And I said, no, I didn’t know that.

And I’ve learned since, also because I’m working in the Middle East now, that it’s rather debatable whether it is forbidden or not. It really depends on a lot of issues and circumstances and so forth. But, so these were the cartoons. They could be rather boring to look at.

But thank you first of all for inviting me to come to speak to you. And I’ll try to be as specific and as concrete as possible.

Certainly, first of all it has been a pleasure to work with the World Press Freedom Committee, and I am certainly very impressed by the comprehensive study of insult laws around the world that we have seen presented here today. It should and it must be read by anyone who cares about free speech.

As the Chairman said it has been a year since the publication of the Mohammed cartoons in the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. But the reverberations are still felt around the world. Last month the French satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, was on trial in Paris, in the country of Voltaire, having published two of the Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons of Mohammed and one of their own.

The acquittal as you know was celebrated across the board, but a closer look at the verdict reveals a more ambiguous picture. In fact it was a compromise between the right to free speech on the one hand and the acquiescence to religious pressure on the other.

The verdict mainly stresses the importance of the context in which the famous cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban appeared. The judge acknowledged that this cartoon is offensive to Muslims, but the publication did not indicate premeditated offense to all Muslims.

The cartoon was part of a public debate of general interest and therefore the legal limitations of free speech were not violated. According to one of the suing Muslim organization’s lawyer, who by the way happened to be the private attorney to French President Chirac, the publication of the cartoon of Mohammed in his turban might, under circumstances, have led to a conviction.

Now, of course, the lawyer has a vested interest in saying so, but if he is right the perspective is indeed scary. The French law talks about defamation but the judge in his decision several times refers to matters offensive or insulting to Muslim sensibility. It may of course be that somebody was insulted or offended. But that is not relevant to the law. The law explicitly refers to defamation and legally defined, defamation, implies not only offense, but also falsehood. That is, one has to lie about facts to defame.

A lot of people will be offended by the truth. Nowadays, you know, it seems that you can hardly say anything before somebody will sue you for anything.

But the truth can never be characterized as defamation. If one claimed to be subject to defamation he has to prove before the court he was defamed, not one’s heroes or icons who lived hundreds of years ago.

If a cartoon can be legal in one context and a crime in another, then the door is wide open to any group who might come forward and insist that any caricature of their leader or hero amounts to defamation.

Libertarians can claim defamation when the late Milton Friedman is ridiculed, Marxists may sue, if somebody makes fun of Friedrich Engels, the supporters of The Enlightenment could take you to court if you ridicule Voltaire. I think the perspective is pretty clear and I don’t think there is any need to elaborate.

The verdict in Paris was somewhat okay but some of the premises may be fatal to free speech. And to quote the British historian, Timothy Garton Ash, who wrote in a recent column:

“In the first decade of the 21st Century the spaces of free expression, even in old established liberal democracies, have been eroded, are being eroded and if we don’t summon ourselves to the fight, will continue to be eroded.”

Free expression is not just the particular preserve of writers and artists. It is a first order freedom, the oxygen on which other liberties depend.

Last year the British Parliament was one vote short of passing a law banning incitements to religious hatred, a bill that effectively would have paved the way for outlawing movies, paintings, novels, not just cartoons. That is legislation to curb free speech.

In France a philosopher has gone into hiding after having received death threats because of a critical article about Islam. In Germany you remember Deutsche Oper in Berlin decided to pull Mozart’s opera “Idomeneo” after threats of violence were recorded by phone to management.

In Britain, extremists forced a play to be closed down because they didn’t like the content, and BBC executives were threatened by another kind of extremist because they decided to broadcast a Jerry Springer Opera ridiculing a religious figure.

And just two weeks ago the United Nations Human Rights Council passed this disastrous resolution calling for dramatic limitations on free speech. The resolution called upon governments to pass laws to protect religions against defamation. It is a paradox and quite odd that this was done by an international body committed to protection of human rights. Because if you look at the world you’ll see, and this is very well documented in this new study, that legislation to protect against so called defamation of religion is one of the most powerful tools to silence dissidents and violate the same human rights as the U.N. was supposed to defeat.

But obviously it didn’t concern the Human Rights Council that decided to condone state punishment for speech that authoritarian governments claim to defame religion. If one were to follow this resolution we should start to ban any criticism of intelligent design or creationism.

Now, it’s quite common these days to hear people say, of course I support free speech and the right to say what you want, but… In the hands of the autocrats this ‘but’ has become a very effective tool to curb free speech. And governments and all kinds of groups with their taboos can ally themselves with one another. If you respect my taboo I’ll respect yours. If this continues long enough we will witness further limitations on speech, crippling free debate, critical journalism and exchange of information.

Mr. Per Nyholm, a longtime foreign correspondent who covered the Balkan wars and now is a columnist with Jyllands-Posten put it this way: To demand special protection of one’s own prejudices, opinions and historical experience is to go against democracy. I understand the importance of the publication of the Mohammed cartoons in this context. They provoked a necessary crisis that led to a new situation in which everything now is open to debate.

This is not the way critics of free speech see it. They have turned Voltaire and The Enlightenment on their heads. Though Voltaire probably didn’t utter the words himself, history has put the famous dictum in his mouth: “I strongly disagree with what you say, but I’m willing to die for your right to say it.”

In a liberal democracy this is the way to treat insults and disagreements, without putting limitations on speech, but unfortunately a lot of people nowadays get it backwards: I accept your right to say whatever you want, but I really think you shouldn’t say it.

This is the way many newspapers and media treated the Mohammed cartoons, including the great newspapers of record in this country. Contrary to major European newspapers, neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post nor the L.A. Times published any of the Mohammed cartoons to give their readers an opportunity to judge for themselves.

Were the cartoons so offensive that they deserved the kind of violent reaction that followed? In the upper left corner of the front page of the New York Times it says “All the News That Is Fit to Print.” It is hard to insist that the Mohammed cartoons weren’t news in 2006. It is also hard for any newsman to produce a newspaper and not offend readers.

I can guarantee you that if you insist on not offending anyone and you do it consistently, you will not be able to fill all the pages of your papers. And we do need — as we all know — some cement to help to have the advertising to hang on the pages.

So why didn’t they publish the cartoons? I don’t know. But an editor of the big American newspapers insisted that you didn’t need to show the cartoons because it is perfectly possible to put in words what is in that cartoon. Well, if this is the case there shouldn’t be any reason for publishing cartoons anymore. And your President should be very happy about that.

And after that, of course, why have photographs? If you can describe everything in words, there’s a lot of saving of money there for the shareholders in the American press. No photographers, no cartoonists.

How do the media cope in this world of pressure from outside and inside, when profits are in danger, when all kinds of vested interests want to exercise influence, influence on what is published?

I can tell you about my own experience from the cartoon crisis. I am Chairman of the board of our company. We publish four daily newspapers. We also cooperate with media organizations in the Middle East, the Balkans, the former Soviet Union and Greenland. We do a lot of work out there for no profit.

It is no secret that editorial lines of our papers differed substantially throughout the cartoon crisis, and they still do. Jyllands-Posten and Politiken are of the opposite view. Not only opposite, but completely opposite.

It was the ultimate test for editorial independence of every newspaper. In the words of Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, this was the biggest foreign policy crisis since World War II and the German occupation, and everyone passed by a comfortable margin. Now we are being very nice and of course certainly some people did not pass the test, but they forgot it.

And why is this? Because the editor-in-chief of each newspaper, at least in our company and in my country, is the only one responsible for the content of his newspaper. There were people from different parts of society who tried to influence the editorial line. Can you imagine if some of the biggest export organizations in the U.S. were crying that the newspapers and the news organizations in the United States should stop printing anything about the cartoons?

What would happen to the shareholders in this country? Would they have been able to stand up to this pressure? Or would they have been headed for the courts?

We were so happy to have a Prime Minister who was able to withstand the pressure. And also we were happy to have people like Mr. Rose and a lot of other journalists and our editors-in-chief who were able to withstand this pressure.

Some years ago we actually had a debate in Denmark about a new media law, and people with good intentions — most people always have good intentions even when they are uttering bad intentions — advocated a new system that would give responsibility to publishers so that editors-in-chief could share responsibility with them.

To some this may sound quite sympathetic. Why should the editor-in-chief alone be responsible? I mean he does get paid a lot of money. Why not accept burden-sharing with the publishers? The thing is of course that with shared responsibility comes the right also to exercise influence on content. And I’m pretty sure that it would have been impossible to safeguard editorial independence if the publishers’ responsibility had been part of the media law in Denmark.

In the cartoon crisis, even at the height of it with burning embassies and all of that, you know that our four newspapers were able to pursue very different editorial lines without any interference from the board and outside pressures.

It was not easy obviously at the time and I might say my job was like a job in the U.N. with so many different interests, but everybody passed the exam, and I think this was a great achievement. We all know that one thing is to discuss principles, another thing is when you really feel the fire under your feet, that when you are faced with the acid test, what is the nature of this person when the pressure is on?

Just look at the newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation. They all came out in support of the war in Iraq and you might ask if all his editors-in-chief in fact supported the war or if other forces were at play?

What other lessons can be drawn from the cartoon crisis? Certainly that we live in a globalized world and that insult laws in one part of the world make it difficult to argue for free speech in other parts of the world.

Insult laws in liberal democracies can be used by dictators to strangle freedom and opposition. This of course means that we have to be consistent. We have to get rid of laws criminalizing the denial of the Holocaust or the genocide of the Armenians.

It is not a crime to deny facts; defamation is a crime. No specific individual is being targeted and therefore we will have to insist on the right to free speech.

And now we come to the end.

Are we ready for this brave new world of communication? Another of our columnists, a gentleman called Anders Jerichow, is working for one of the newspaper Politiken, A few weeks ago he wrote:

“The cartoon crisis is a frightening example that makes it clear that the world really isn’t ready for its own globalization. Before the crisis few people at Jyllands-Posten would have thought that their newspaper will be read and make an impression in Islamabad. And equally few people in Tehran or Damascus would have given any serious consideration that political arsonists in that part of the world would undermine their case beyond the horizon.

“The states that allowed religious fanatics to threaten the cartoonists and others need more freedom of speech, not less. And it is better to have many cartoons rather than fewer.”

To sum it up, what we need is free speech. Freedom of speech is the most important mechanism. And it cannot be cut into slices. Freedom of speech is not like a menu where you can pick and choose whatever satisfies one’s own appetite, depending on the occasion.

It is of vital importance that all citizens and of course especially the media, and especially the icons of the media, the New York Times and the Washington Post, challenge the law, test it all the time as they used to do during the Pentagon Papers and so forth.

Freedom of speech provides oxygen for any society. Freedom of speech is the very basis for development and progress in any country, no matter where in the world. Therefore, to my mind, to Mr. Rose’s mind and to a lot of other people’s minds, we must all stand firm. There is no room for soft talk or misplaced understanding or compromise or we will be misused.

Thank you.