The murders of journalists in Russia, the jailing of bloggers in China, and the crackdown on the media in Iran regularly remind us that freedom of expression is under duress, even in an era of expanding global communications.

However, considerably less attention has been paid to a new, more insidious threat to this fundamental human right. It involves campaigns by a variety of actors — from foreign governments and business moguls to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) — to discourage journalists, scholars, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and others from speaking out or publishing material on certain subjects.

This creeping censorship is manifesting itself in venues including the United Nations, the judicial systems of established democracies, and elsewhere. Often, the objective is to place restrictions on what people can say or publish about Islam. But the offensive is also being carried forward by others, including oligarchs in the former Soviet Union.

Targeting Democracies

The focus of the free-speech debate has traditionally been on societies where freedom was lacking. What really sets apart this contemporary strain of censorship, however, is that it is increasingly focused on restricting information and opinion in Europe, North America, and other bastions of free expression. Today, standards in democracies are the target.

Consider the following developments of the past few years:

-- Two units of the UN system, the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council, passed resolutions that call for restrictions on what people can say or write about religions, especially Islam. The principal targets of the resolutions were clearly the democracies of Europe rather than autocracies where both free speech and religious liberty are already heavily constrained

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Democracies Confront Their Own Growing Censorship Tendencies