“Drawing a line: hate and freedom of speech”

Freedom of speech has been a fundamental human right since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Kiiza Saddam Hussein, 26, a Commonwealth Correspondent who lives in Uganda and Rwanda, argues that while we should enjoy these rights, they are not absolute. Duties and responsibilities may impose some limitations as the world draw lines between rights of expression and hate speech.

According to the Oxford dictionary, hate speech connotes “Abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice against a particular group, especially on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation”.

In centuries and decades past, hate speech was used as vehicle to provoke religious and ethnic conflicts that led to commission of heinous crimes.

We can dissect a few examples to see how hate speech was used to promote wars. It’s common knowledge that Adolph Hitler used the rhetoric of hate speech to instigate the 1941-1945 Holocaust killings of the Jewish community, referring to them as “well-poisoners of the German people”. This led to extermination of more than six million Jewish people.

n 1994 Rwanda genocide politicians and journalist of that time used hate speech that divided Rwandan people into three ethnic groups, referring to one of them as cockroaches and less human thus calling for their mass killings. This led to the deaths of around 1,000,000 Rwandans.

Similarly, in Kenya in 2007 politicians with their own selfish ideology used hate speeches to divided Kenyans along ethnic lines so as to win political leverage, which in turn caused ethnic violence that caused over 1500 deaths of Kenyan people.

Hate speech has been also used by terrorists like ISIS to convert and motivate so-called Muslims to commit suicide bombing against other divides of religious and political beliefs, which has claimed thousands of innocent people across the world.