Next Century Foundation Senior Research Officer on Terrorism and Extremism Cristina De Leo addresses the United Nations Human Rights Council during its 62nd session, raising concerns about the UK’s growing reliance on restrictions on freedom of expression to address hate and extremism. She highlights the risks of suppressing rather than confronting extremist narratives, and calls for a greater emphasis on open dialogue and educational initiatives to foster critical thinking and build resilience against extremist ideologies.
NCF UN Oral Statement UNHRC62 session
Transcript:
In the United Kingdom, legislation aimed at tackling hate and extremism has increasingly relied on restrictions on expression.
Most recently, while the Online Safety Act has imposed welcome duties on online platforms to mitigate the amplification of harmful content, it has also sought to limit the spread of harmful ideas through a wider range of measures, including making it an offence to share certain forms of disinformation.
We are concerned that such measures reflect a tendency in UK policy to address hate and extremism through speech regulation. This trend is reflected in earlier legislation such as the Terrorism Act 2006, which criminalises certain expressions that glorify or justify terrorism.
While well-intentioned, these approaches are counterproductive. Suppressing extremist ideas does not eliminate them; it displaces them into less visible spaces where they develop and spread unchecked. To effectively counter extremist beliefs, they must be challenged, not hidden. This allows them to be scrutinised, which exposes their analytical flaws and helps diminish their appeal.
To address the growing threat of extremism, we urge the UK government to prioritise open dialogue over speech regulation.
To this end, it should develop educational initiatives that promote critical thinking skills and engagement with extremist narratives. This may include mandatory training in schools and universities on how to assess the reliability of sources, test arguments by evaluating evidence, and understand the emotional manipulation techniques commonly used by extremist groups to radicalise individuals.
One Response
This was a well-argued and well-written intervention, thank you Cristina for sharing it. As a former UK government official, allow me to give a different perspective. This is strictly a personal view and not a statement of government policy.
The first duty of any government is to keep its citizens safe. While physical measures such as border controls and defence forces have their part to play, a key element is maintaining a cohesive, high-trust society with norms that promote social goods (such as tolerance, transparency and the rule of law) and discourage social harms such as hatred, prejudice and terrorism.
This immediately creates a dilemma: what if people use the freedom of expression that society grants them to promote values or incite people to actions that undermine the foundations of society itself? This is the paradox of tolerance, first articulated by philosopher Karl Popper in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies published in 1945. Popper’s conclusion was that a free society *must* refuse to tolerate intolerant groups if it wants to keep its own freedom. Clearly this is a simplification – the Wikipedia article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance unpacks the arguments well.
This is the rationale behind restrictions on freedom of expression imposed by democratic governments. It has for many years been an offence to incite violence or racial hatred in the UK. The Online Safety Act is simply the most recent development of the same principle. There is certainly a debate to be had about where the boundary should be set and which expressions are so harmful that they should rightly be banned. For example, Holocaust denial is an offence in some countries though not in Britain.
The statement argues that “suppressing extremist ideas does not eliminate them; it displaces them into less visible spaces where they develop and spread unchecked. To effectively counter extremist beliefs, they must be challenged, not hidden.” The evidence on this is mixed. Proponents of terrorist ideology tend not to be interested in debate. Challenging their beliefs is likely to generate heat rather than light. All too often it leads only to abuse and vilification of the person expressing a contrary view. Facebook, TikTok, X are all powerful engines for the dissemination of ideas. Denying access to these platforms reduces the ease with which extremist ides are disseminated. Yes, they can still spread – but not unchecked, that’s the point.
All of the ideas you mention in your final paragraph are valid and should be employed. They are no substitute, in my view, for laws that seek to mitigate online harms to our society including messages and videos designed to spread hate and extremism.