Switzerland: Anti-minaret posters accused of inciting hatred

Switzerland: Anti-minaret posters accused of inciting hatred

See here for a gallery of pro and anti minaret posters.

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The Federal Commission against Racism says posters for the rightwing Swiss People's Party's anti-minaret campaign "incite hatred".


Cities around Switzerland have reacted differently. While Lausanne and Yverdon-les-Bains in canton Vaud followed Basel in outlawing the posters in publicly owned spaces, Geneva, Zurich and Lucerne have rejected the ban on free-speech grounds.


Nevertheless on Thursday the authorities in Zurich and Lucerne made a point of condemning the posters' content.


The main poster, which shows a woman in a burka and a Swiss flag with minarets springing out of it, infers that "the Muslim minority living in Switzerland may represent a terrible danger" the commission said in a statement.


Representatives from the People's Party said the commission is censoring free-speech like Nazis and communists.


But the commission argued that freedom of expression ends at discrimination and limits are needed to safeguard Swiss society from action that incites hate.


"It's important to have a space where democratic debate takes place, but we need to fix limits," commission vice-president Sabine Simkhovitch-Dreyfus told swissinfo.ch. The commission had looked at five posters.


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Source: SwissInfo (English)