Protecting Beliefs or Believers?: Blasphemy Law in Asian Countries

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Protecting Beliefs or Believers?:Blasphemy Law in Asian Countries
Gilang Lukman (Ritsumeikan University, Department of International Relations)

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Protecting Beliefs or Believers?:
Blasphemy Law in Asian Countries
Introduction
On October 2016, 44-years-old Meliana swept her tears in agony as she listened to
the sentence of her criminal proceedings in the High Court of Medan, Indonesia. A Buddhist
housewife, she was sentenced to spend 18 months in prison for uttering a remark that
offended Islam, as she remarked that the sound of adhan——the public call for Muslims to
pray—produced by the stereo of her neighboring Mosque was “too loud” while subsequently
asking one of her Muslim friend to lower its volume (Gunawan, 2018). The judge decided
that Meliana had transgressed the law due to her offensive comment towards one of the six
official religions in Indonesia, albeit the fact that comment was conveyed secretively to her
personal acquaintance and not in public. Meliana’s tribulations did not end there; her
husband lost her job as result of social seclusion and her house was vandalized by
displeased mobs (Soeriaatmadja, 2018). Evidently, her case is but one piece of the bleak
image of the Indonesian enforcement of its Penal Code, whose Article 156 A outlaws public
expressions that “have the character of being at enmity with, abusing or staining a religion”.
The Article is the pillar of the country’s Undang-Undang Penistaan Agama or the Religious
Defamation Act, which in legal scholarship falls under the category of blasphemy law.
Based upon the Greek word blasphemia meaning “slander” or “reviling”, blasphemy
laws refer to the national legal provisions prohibiting the utterance or expression of speech
which has the effect of profaning beliefs that are held sacred, usually that of religions to
which a substantial number of the population adhere. Blasphemy fits into the broader issue
issue on religious offence which, according to a cross-country study by the Council of
Europe’s European Commission for Democracy through Law, can be divided into three
categories: (1) blasphemy, (2) insult and (3) incitement to religious hatred (Kananovich,
2015, p. 383). Of the three, the prohibition on blasphemy is deemed by legalists as the
most controversial. The problem, so the legalists argue, lies in the objective of blasphemy
laws that is to protect the belief, a set of conception and ideas, of religious adherents rather
than their physical and emotional integrity. Under a legal-positivist framework, measuring an

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offense against the former, abstract and transcendent as it were, is much harder to conduct
than the latter. Oster (2016) summarizes the sheer challenge of such a task, stating that
“[a]uthorities would be tasked with the burden of deciding, first, what actually constitues a
religion; second, which aspects of the religion—gods, symbols, sacred figures—should be
protected; and third, what qualifies as a ‘defamation’ of that religion” (p. 148). In other
words, the absence of a clear indicator on the kind of expression that is tantamount to
blasphemy renders the law vulnerable to misuse. Arbitrary detention, in this scenario, is not
an unlikely outcome.
The growing number of trials around the world pertaining to religious offences in
recent years has increased public and academic interest towards blasphemy laws. Indeed,
Indonesia is not alone in restricting religiously offensive expressions. Still fresh too in our
memory is the major uproar that erupted in Pakistan following the issuance of a death
sentence to two Christian Pakistanis whose website was judged to have vilified the image of
Prophet Mohammed (Siddique & Hayat, 2008). Meanwhile in 2015, a New Zealander in
Myanmar was convicted and sentenced to 30 months in prison for portraying Buddha in a
disrespectful manner in his online advertisement (Moe & Ramzy, 2015). Upon hearing the
story of the three aforementioned blasphemy cases, few would disagree that the sheer gravity
of the issue of blasphemy is too profound to be ignored.
As per 2014, approximately 50 countries and territories criminalized blasphemy in
their legal system, with the types of punishment ranging from fine penalty, imprisonment to
death sentence (Theodorou, 2016). While the countries enforcing blasphemy laws reflect a
diverse cultural and religious background—ranging from Catholic Ireland, Protestant Denmark,
Orthodox Russia, Buddhist Myanmar, Hindu India, Confucian Singapore, Sunni Egypt to Shia
Iran—it is evident that the bulk of these countries, close to half of them, are located in the
Asian continent.1) According to a report by Global Legal Research Institute (2017), these
Asian countries, especially the ones with Muslim-majority population, are the place where
blasphemy laws are more likely to be “actively enforced” (p. 2) in contrast to other regions
where the laws formally exist yet are dormant in practice.
Together with the nations of the Third World, Asian countries have generally been
in agreement in defending the practice of outlawing blasphemous expressions in various
international platforms, primarily the United Nations. In 2009, the UN General Assembly
1) The paper employs the geographical, rather than the socio-cultural, concept of Asia to decide
which countries are considered Asian and, accordingly, falls into the scope of our analysis. The
somewhat contested and fluid notion of Asia and the underlying premises that set the stage for
its advent are discussed in Acharya’s (2010) The Idea of Asia.

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passed Resolution 64/156 entitled “Combating Defamation of Religions” which emphasized
“the need to combat defamation of religions, and incitement to religious hatred in general”.
It also called states to take measures in protecting religious “symbol”, a term that the
resolution—problematically—did not delve further to define. The draft of the resolution was
adopted with the majority Asian countries voted overwhelmingly in favor and only a small
percentage abstaining; South Korea is by far the sole Asian country to have voted against
blasphemy-related UN resolutions.
Within the framework of the United Nations, countries that are members of the
Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) have had a particularly leading role in advocating
the international prohibition against blasphemy. As the Organization’s sole representative in
the UN Human Right Council during the 2009 debate, Pakistani Permanent Representative to
the United Nations Zamir Akram reiterated the position of the Muslim world with regards to
blasphemy laws, stating that “deliberate attempts to discriminate, defame, denigrate and
vilify” religions do not fall under the freedom of expression as guaranteed in international
human rights treaties (Nebehay, 2012). The fact that the loudest voice in favor of blasphemy
laws in these forums seems to have been produced by Muslim countries paints an image of
a contest between religious sanctity and freedom of expression of which “Islam” and “the
West” are two main opposing players. The sheer amount of publications discussing this
(supposed) civilizational clash provides ample evidence of this image’s popularity (Kalanges,
2012; Manea, 2016; Said, 1979; Siddique & Hayat, 2008; Varagur, 2017). Indeed, few
attempts have been made to challenge the notion that the debate regarding blasphemy laws
constitutes an exclusively “Islam vs. the West” affair and, subsequently, broaden the
discussion by incorporating a more expansive regional approach—one that puts several
countries of different cultural and religious background yet of the same geographical frontier
as the object of analysis. This paper maintains, as it would be argued later, that Asia is not
only the regional entity that is most befitting for such a novel approach, but also the most
potentially intriguing.
The lack of studies on Asian blasphemy laws is understandable for at least two
reasons. The first is the sheer size of the continent and the tremendous diversity that lies
within it. Indeed, it would prove difficult to draw parallels between nations as culturally and
geographically distant as Brunei-Sri Lanka, Mongolia-Bahrain or Japan-Nepal. Whether a
certain “Asian common ground” can be derived from a cross-cultural study of the
aforementioned countries remains a question to be answered. Secondly, the popularity of the
so-called “Asian value” argument, which reached its heyday in the 1990s, has been, since

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the Asian Financial Crisis, in a state of increasing demise (Donnelly, 1999; Hoon, 2004;
Thompson, 2004). The Asian assertion that communal interest should be priotized over
individual rights would no longer enjoy as much acknowledgement as it was before.
Likewise, the idea that there actually exist a position towards human rights that is
particularly Asian in nature—one that is held by the countries of Asia by virtue of being
“culturally Asian” (Hewison, 1999, p. 230), rather than out of mere coincidence for being
geographically located in Asia—has become increasingly difficult to maintain, more so in the
current climate where universal UN-centered human rights regime enjoys an ever-growing
international support.
Be that as it may, this paper is of the opinion that conducting an Asian
contextualization of blasphemy laws still bears promising merits. The fact remains evident, as
it has been elaborated earlier, that Asia hosts the majority of countries that still enforce
blasphemy laws and that these countries represent various religious traditions. For these two
reasons, it would be naivé to assume that, firstly, the congregation of blasphemy-outlawing
countries in Asia is a pure geographical coincidence undeserving of further academic scrutiny
and that, secondly, the crusade against blasphemy constitutes an exclusively Islamic affair.
This paper seeks to address these inaccurate assumptions. It aims at analyzing the nature and
varience of blasphemy law implementation in Asian countries, locating its drawbacks and,
ultimately, formulating policy reccommendations to rectify aspects assessed to be problematic.
To perform the task outlined above, this paper is organized into two main sections.
In the first section, a case study is conducted to analyze the factors that give rise to, and
the methods of enforcing, blasphemy laws in Asian countries. To cope with the broadness of
the topic, the case study clustered Asian countries into two major religious traditions, namely
the Abrahamic tradition, which consists of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the Dharmic
tradition, comprising Hinduism and Buddhism. Six countries are selected to represent the
diversity of the Asian religious tradition. With regards to Islam, the paper selects Indonesia
and Pakistan. Pakistan is chosen in light of the very high frequency of blasphemy law
invocation and severity of punishment as compared to other Asian countries, while Indonesia
due to its status as the most populous Muslim-majority country and as a representation of
the Southeast Asian Islam, deemed by scholars to be more moderate than its South Asian
and West Asian counterparts (Houben, 2003; Rabasa, 2005). With regards to Christianity, the
case study choses the Philippines and Russia to cover both the Catholic and Orthodox
tradition of the religion respectively. Finally, a case study is conducted regarding India, as
the biggest and most populous Hindu-majority country, and Myanmar, whose blasphemy law

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is arguably the strictest among Buddhist-majority countries. From these case studies, the
paper would distill the common features that are deemed as problematic among critiques of
blasphemy laws on the grounds of freedom of expression. The paper closes with a set of
stimulants for future attempts at formulating concrete policy recommendations.
Abrahamic tradition
Widely celebrated as the first person who codified the Jewish law, the great Moses
Maimonides of Egypt (1135–1204) formulated thirteen tenets of Judaism that every adherent
of the faith is required to embrace. Of these, the belief on the complete divinity and
inviolability of the Torah, the Holy Book from which the Jewish people derive truth, is
central. As Maimonedes once wrote in his seminal work The Guide for The Perplexed,
“[t]ruth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with
it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it”. Indeed, his contention that “truths
are Jewish only” (Seeskin, 2013, para. 16) has been an important hallmark of traditional
Jewish thinking. This particular Jewish doctrine that Maimonides summarized can also be
found within the Christian and Islamic tradition. Also termed as the theological claim for
exclusive truth (Frank, 2016), it encapsulates the idea that their respective religion is the one
true faith and, by extension, that other forms of belief are regarded as false; “the Abrahamic
religions”, noted Padukone and Christopher (2012), “see other paths as inferior”. Given the
exclusivist position embedded in these three traditions, it is unsurprising that the act of
forbidding blasphemy has been a historically Abrahamic phenomenon; the oldest practices of
forbidding religious defamations—in its written legal form—can be traced back to as far as
16th century Christian England (Hare, 2017).
Traditionally, the creation of blasphemy laws was motivated by the perceived
religious duty to ensure that incorrect beliefs, heresies and sacrilegious statements did not
roam freely, out of the fear that their spread may harm the purity of the correct belief and
the moral embodiment upon which it is based. The present practice of blasphemy laws
among countries of Abrahamic tradition, however, lacks such crusade-like objectives of its
predecessor. With the sole exception of theocratic states, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and the
Holy See, and Islamic democracies, such as Pakistan, virtually all of Abrahamic countries
justify the maintenance of their blasphemy laws through the concept of public order; the
ultimate objective in other words is to protect societal unity, not religion as such (Crouch,

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2012; Jones, 1980; Sandberg & Doe, 2008). How this narrative manifests in practice is
discussed in the four following country studies, namely Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia and the
Philippines.
With 88 percent of its 260 million population professing Islam, Indonesia is
indisputably the biggest Muslim-majority country in the world. This Southeast Asian country
recognizes six religions that are officially administered by the state through its Ministry of
Religious Affairs, namely Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and
Confucianism (Fenton, 2016). Adherents of these official religions are privileged, in the
sense that only their religious festivals are made national holidays, their marriage legally
recognized and, specific to our topic, their beliefs protected by the law from blasphemous
remarks. The Indonesian blasphemy law found its origin in a 1965 Presidential Decree that
added Article 156 A prohibiting religiously offensive expressions, with a maximum
punishment of 5 years in prison, in the country’s Penal Code (Crouch, 2012). A study by
Setara Institute on the Indonesian blasphemy law found that out of the 97 blasphemy
lawsuits between 1965 and 2017, 88 cases were filed after the 1998 downfall of the
dictatorial President Soeharto (Putsanra, 2018). This is rather surprising, as the rise of
democracy in the country seems to have triggered, instead of mitigated, the proliferation of
blasphemy lawsuits. The Institute also found that most of the reported cases that were
eventually sent to jail were those that are preceded by mass protest and coercion.
By and large, the reasoning behind the Indonesian blasphemy is the preservation of
public order. Evidence of this reasoning can be found in the Constitution as well as in
several case laws. Article 28 J (2) of the Constitution stipulates that:
In exercising his/her rights and freedoms, every person shall have the duty to
accept the restrictions established by law for the sole purposes of guaranteeing
the recognition and respect of the rights and freedoms of others and of
satisfying just demands based upon considerations of morality, religious values,
security and public order in a democratic society [emphasis added].
This provision gives ground for the Indonesian Constitutional Court to reject several
attempts at nullifying the blasphemy law through judicial review. The most recent of such
attempt was in 2009, where the Court decided in overwhelming majority—with only one
dissenting opinion by Justice Maria Farida, the only female and Christian judge—that the

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blasphemy law is indeed constitutional and that it does not infringe the right of religious
freedom and freedom of expression pursuant to Article 28 E and 29 of the Constitution
(Crouch, 2012).
Unlike the Indonesian blasphemy law which, in theory, is designed to neutrally
protect the six official religions without giving preferential treatment to one over the other,
its Pakistani counterpart is rather explicit in stating that the blasphemy law is meant solely
to protect Islam. Although the Article 19 of the Pakistani Constitution provides the right of
freedom of expression to all its citizens, this freedom can be restricted on the grounds of
preserving “the glory of Islam” as well as “public order, decency or morality”. Furthermore,
Article 31 of the Constitution clarifies that the state has the duty to maintain an individual
and collective Islamic way of life among its citizens.
Pakistan, similar to Indonesia, has also witnessed an increasing trend of reports of
blasphemy cases (Varagur, 2017). The Pakistani penal code provides a rather meticulous
listing on the kinds of religious offences punishable by the law and the type of penalty
attributed to each (Forte, 1994). For example, the direct and indirect insult against Prophet
Muhammad—orally, visually, or otherwise—is punishable by death, while damaging a printed
copy of the Quran has the maximum punishment of life imprisonment, pursuant to Article
295-B and 295-C of the Code respectively. It is noteworthy to point out that the intention
to profane matters not in deciding whether or not someone is punishable under the
blasphemy law; in fact, merely being an adherent of a sect that is considered heretical can
lead to punishment in this country, with the legal persecution against Muslims following the
Ahmadi sect being the most notable example.
Of the six selected case studies, Pakistan is the strictest in enforcing their blasphemy
law. Since the late 1980s with the introduction of various amendments of the provisions
regarding blasphemy in the Pakistani Penal Code, 633 Muslims, 494 Ahmadis, 187
Christians and 21 Hindus have been accused with blasphemy charges. No less than 53 of
the accused in the same period became the victims of mob killing (International Commission
of Jurists, 2015). One of such cases is the killing of a university student named Mashal
Khan over allegations, later discredited, of posting blasphemous content on social media.
(Varagur, 2017). Despite the prevalence of such extrajudicial street justice, the efforts by the
Pakistani government to reform the blasphemy law and to guarantee greater safety against its
misuse have remained minimum.
Evidently, the degree of frequency of blasphemy charges and the severity of the
punishment thereof in Muslim-majority Asian countries, as our Indonesian and Pakistani case

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study have exemplified, is far greater than that of their Christian counterpart. In the Russian
Federation, the epicenter of Orthodox Christianity, adherents of religion are protected by
federal law from intentional public acts and expressions that may hurt their religious feeling
or object of worship (Kananovich, 2015). The prohibition against such offensive expressions
were legally codified as recently as 2013, imposing offenders with the maximum punishment
of three years in prison and fine up to 500,000 rubles. Additional prohibition was also made
against public desecration of holy objects, punishable with 200,000 rubles of fine at
maximum.
Triggering the end of the century-long vacuum of blasphemy law in Russia was a
news-breaking incident in 2012 called the Pussy Riot Case. The case refers to a vulgar act
by a girl-band named Pussy Riot whose three members staged a singing performance
conveying messages of political criticism directed against the mutual support between
President Putin and the Orthodox Church. The performance sparked wide controversy as it
was done inside the holiest Orthodox Christian site in Russia, the Moscow Cathedral of
Christ the Savior. The members were arrested for orchestrating an act of “hooliganism
motivated by religious hatred” and were eventually sentenced to prison; two members had
spent 21 months in prison before receiving amnesty and the other one 7 months before her
imprisonment was suspended (Voorhoof, 2018). As a blasphemy law did not exist in Russia
at that time, the Pussy Riot members were charged for violating Article 213 of the Criminal
Code which prohibits hooligan acts, defined as “gross violation of the public order
manifested in patent contempt of society”. The tremendous uproar that erupted following the
incident further amounted the pressure towards the government to take actions, which
eventually led the Duma to pass the blasphemy law the next year.
While one may agree that the Pussy Riot performance had indeed gone too far and
that their imprisonment was hence justified, one need not necessarily support the Russian
criminalization of blasphemy, as several events following the 2013 adoption of the
blasphemy law seems to indicate that the law is very vulnerable to the abuse of power. In
2016, 38-years-old Viktor Krasnov was reportedly detained by the Russian police for posting
remarks that promoted atheist views online. His statement that “there is no God” was
charged to have offended “the sentiments of the Orthodox believers” (Fenton, 2016, para. 4).
Furthemore, the absence of the definition of religious feelings in the law may render acts
considered sinful, such as homosexual relationship, tantamount to blasphemy (Kuznetsov,
2014), which is particularly concerning given the increasingly homophobic climate inside the
country (Essig, 2014; Kon, 2010).

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The salience of Christianity in politics and social life, as our study on Russia has
indicated, can also be found in the Philippines; although the constitution of both countries
strictly mandated the separation of church and state, conservative Christian values such as
the reprehension against abortion, divorce and homosexuality still have strong political
resonance there. The issue of blasphemy is no exception. Hailed as the most populous
Christian country in Asia, the Philippines have outlawed blasphemy long since the Spanish
colonial era when Catholicism was still officially the state religion. Then, blasphemy was
tightly connected with the concept of lèse majesté, as the sovereign of Philippines, the
Spanish king, was seen as the personification of divine rule on earth and hence “to defame
the King or his subalterns is to defame God’s temporal embodiment” (Hilbay, 2013, para.
4). According to Article 133 of the Penal Code, which governed over the issue of
“offending religious feelings”, the act of blasphemy can lead to maximum 6 months of
suffrage suspension and 28 months of imprisonment. Interestingly, the Article specifically
gives scope to only punish blasphemy done “in a place devoted to religious worship or
during the celebration of any religious ceremony”. Offences that take place elsewhere,
legalists argued, are beyond the reach of the Article (Sasot, 2018).
As the Philippines have reached their independence from Spain and since the
theocratic government system has been replaced with a democratic one, there exist strong
calls to rectify the country’s blasphemy law. Despite the fear of the law’s frequent misuse,
there has only been one case since the independence where a citizen is convicted due to
blasphemy, namely the 2010 Celdran case. Carlos Celdran is an ardent cultural activist
known for his critical view towards the Catholic Church. On September 2010, Celdran
staged a protest during an ecumenical service inside the Manila Cathedral as an expression
of his critique towards the Church’s opposition against the proposed Reproductive Health
Bill that would legalize family planning (Robles, 2012; Sauler & Arceo-Dumlao, 2013).
Celdran was convicted not solely by virtue of his offensive protest but because he conducted
his protest in a place of worship and that his action, moreover, disrupted an ongoing prayer.
Several attendees during the service also talked of how Celdran’s action left a “traumatic”
experience, equivalent to psychological damage (Escalona & Caguioa, 2013, p. 406). In as
much as Celdran has the right to criticize the Church, some argued that “there are proper
fora to express such opinions—the Manila Cathedral not being one” (p. 402).

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Dharmic tradition
Although we have talked about how blasphemy is an originally Abrahamic
conception, it does not follow that countries belonging to the other religious traditions do
not impose blasphemy laws. This, too, applies to the countries of the Dharmic tradition. As
a preliminarily introduction, these Dharmic countries are statistically less likely to blasphemy
law than their Abrahamic counterparts; and even if they do, the adoption of the law is
typically much more recent. Furthermore, the law rarely if ever sprang domestically as a
collective movement aimed at preserving the sanctity of religion. More often, blasphemy
law is rather imported from outside, usually by the Western colonizer who reigned over
their region prior to their independence. This is particularly true with regards to our selected
case studies, namely India and Myanmar, both of which were formerly ruled under the
British Raj; the British administrator created the law with the objective of preventing
religious frictions among their colonial subjects, for the preservation of internal stability was
much needed to further their grip over the colonial territory and the resources that lied
within it (Aswad, Hussain, & Suleman, 2014).
The prohibition against blasphemy in both India and Myanmar stems from the same
section in the former Penal Code of British India—a region that also comprised modern-day
Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka—that is Article 295 A (Sathisan, Ambast, & Omer,
2015). The Article punishes “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious
feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs” with imprisonment, fine
penalty or both. This centuries-old provision have remained in effect in India, despite the
fact that the Indian judiciary has repeatedly stressed the “inclusive and plural nature of
Hinduism”, in contrast to the exclusivist Christian value of the British Crown, which makes
the prohibition of blasphemy in a Hindu-Indian setting conceptually “incoherent” (Bhatia,
2016, para. 2).
Just as the Indonesian case, there have also been attempts to question the
constitutionality of the Indian blasphemy law in the Supreme Court, especially whether the
current practice of the law is compatible with the stipulation of Article 19 of the
Constitution on the freedom of speech and the 8 types of legitimate speech restriction
outlined therein. Characterized as an institution that “very evidently privileged social order
over civil liberties” (Bhatia, 2016, para. 8), the Supreme Court has had the traditional stance
of defending blasphemy laws in the interest of preserving public order. Although in recent
years, the Supreme Court has issued decisions which seems to uplift the threshold of the

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offences that are punishable by the blasphemy law. For example in the 1957 Ramji Lal
Modi vs State of UP case, the court decided that the law only punished “intentional insults”
(para. 13), while later on in the 2015 Shreya Singhal vs Union of India case the scope was
further narrowed to “incitement of violence” (para. 19).
Interestingly, for a country with a population and territorial size as massive as India,
the reports of blasphemy cases in the country is relatively low; needless to mention, the
frequency is nowhere close to its Pakistani neighbor. Head of Amnesty International India
Aakar Patel (2012) attributed the trend to the higher level of tolerance within the Indian
society as well as the pragmatism of its law-enforcing institutions. The challenge that the
Indian government ought to immediately address is perhaps not so much the issue of
reforming the law, but the tackling of blasphemy-related incidents outside of the legal
framework. The unresolved killing of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar, who was shot dead on
August 2013 following his campaign against frauds in the form of superstitious Hindu
practices (Rahman, 2013), shows just how much the Indian citizens are still away from
being able to convey expressions towards religion without the worry of violent repercussion.
Much like India, blasphemy law is an originally foreign concept in Myanmar. There
is no direct concept of blasphemy that fits its conventional Abrahamic understanding in
Buddhist scriptures, which, Jerryson (2016) maintained, explains why the subject has been
virtually dismissed in Buddhist scholarship. Nonetheless, blasphemy law finds a comfort
niche in Myanmar’s authoritarian setting as it adds another tool to justify government’s
censorship of dissenting opinion. In 1961, the controversial “State Religion Promotion Act”
was adopted in the Burmese parliament which officially designated as Buddhism as the
religion of the state (Min, 2015). Despite the abrogation of the Act following a coup d’état
in 1962, remnants of its Buddhist-centric ideas persist in Article 351 of the Constitution
which acknowledges the “special position of Buddhism” as the religion most professed by
the population. Although the language of the Burmese blasphemy law is religion-neutral, its
implementation tends to disproportionately protect Buddhism while offenses towards minority
religions are largely dismissed (Sathisan, Ambast, & Omer, 2015). Among these cases are
the two year imprisonment of prominent politician Htin Lin Oo due to his public criticism
against several Buddhist organizations in 2015 (Jerryson, 2016) and the conviction of three
bar managers in Yangon who portrayed Buddha wearing headphones in the advertisement of
their establishment (Moe & Ramzy, 2015). These two cases are only indicative of the
instances which were revealed in public and resolved judicially. Given the dire condition of
democracy, media openness and the rule of law in country, it is likely that there are still

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many instances of street justice an arbitrary arrest against alleged blasphemers in Myanmar
waiting to be revealed.
Towards a Middle Ground
Having analyzed our six case studies, we can conclude that blasphemy-outlawing
Asian countries have a diverse motivation and method of implementing its laws. It is also
evident that the type of offences punishable by the law and the degree of severity of their
penalty differ from one country to another. Despite this variance, our selected countries seem
to have a common ground in their resistance towards an imposition of a UN-based human
rights regime, based primarily on Western liberal values. This anti-Western sentiment may
have stemmed from bitter colonial experience, for the case of Indonesia, India, Myanmar,
the Philippines and Pakistan, as well as, for the case of Russia, historically contingent
geo-political and cultural rivalry. However, the prospect of bridging the divide between the
Asian and UN-centered position on the issue of blasphemy seems to have bloomed since the
past decade or so.
Two important developments are contributive to this optimistic trend. The first is the
issuance of General Comment 34 by the Human Rights Committee in clarifying Article 19
of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (henceforward, “the Covenant”).
Point 48 of the document maintains that “[p]rohibitions of displays of lack of respect for a
religion or other belief system, including blasphemy laws, are incompatible with the
Covenant”. This provision provides an unprecedented legal pressure towards
blasphemy-outlawing countries who are parties to the Covenant to comply with the
UN-centered human rights regime which puts priority to individual rights over collective
interest. The second was the adoption of the UN General Assembly Resolution 16/18 in
2011. The Resolution is groundbreaking in that it resolves the long-rift between Western
countries and Third World Nations over the issue of blasphemy by shifting the focus of
legal protection from beliefs to believers; in other words, one would only be punished for
expressing hateful speech that has a direct harm to a believer, instead merely expressing
opinions deemed offensive by a certain belief. Members of the OIC, who had traditionally
been adamant in defending their blasphemy laws, were quite surprisingly supportive of the
Resolution. There has also been a changing discourse in the proponent camp, from the
support to criminalize blasphemy to one against the incitement of religious hatred (Butt,

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2016).
These developments are quickly interpreted by several human rights organizations as
an international “green-light” to completely erase blasphemy laws once and for all. Several
campaigns for the abolishment of blasphemy law have sprung in recent years, such as the
“End Blasphemy Law” campaign co-organized by the International Coalition Against
Blasphemy Laws and the International Humanist and Ethical Union. This view is also
popular within the circle of scholars in the discipline of human rights law. For example,
Kovacs (2015) maintained that according to international law “there is no right not to be
insulted or offended by speech that is shocking or disturbing” (p. 4), while Leirvik (2011)
remarked that legislations aimed at protecting the sanctity of the divine is widely considered
as “pre-modern” (p. 96). On the same note, Oster (2016) suggested that “the notion of
‘defamation of religions’ as such must be rejected” (p. 146).
At a glance, the scholarly argumentations in support of abolishing blasphemy laws
appear compelling. However, further scrutiny on their position may lead us to a different
conclusion. For a starter, a closer reading of the General Comment 34 reveals that the
Committee does not mandate the abolishment of blasphemy laws per se. It clarifies that
there are still exceptions to the right of freedom of expression and that the countries which
fulfilled the requirements set by the Convention—whose threshold was further interpreted by
the Committee to become stricter—may impose restrictions, including in the form of
blasphemy laws. Furthermore, while the adoption of Resolution 16/18 was a historical
achievement, it was far from being ideal. States who have voted in favor of the Resolution
performed slowly in translating its content into actual domestic policies; not more than
twenty-four of these states that had submitted the reports on their progress on implementing
the Resolution (Baumgart-Ochse, 2015). Of equal importance, we must also take note of the
fact that the majority of the quoted scholarly opinions show strong leaning to liberal
democratic values, which is much embedded in modern Western culture. It is time to
acknowledge that there are other strands of democracy, one which may not fully adhere to
the liberal school, claimed as universal and normative by its proponents, but are no less
legitimate and functional. As soundly phrased by Subramaniam (2000, p. 30),
The universalist position that western liberal democracy is compatible with
Asian cultures leads easily to what one scholar calls “wishful thinking” about
democracy. The moral force of universalist critiques of Asian values is greatest
when the arguments are explicitly framed in terms of democracy versus
authoritarianism. However, more relevant is the universalists’ implicit claim for

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the universality of liberal democracy, a variant of democratic political systems
that includes western liberal values. Far from being universal, those values are
unique to the historical, political, social, and cultural experiences of western
Europe [emphasis added].
In light of this apparent chasm, the paper is fully supportive towards the
establishment and the promotion of a middle ground. On one hand, it opines that the
demands towards Asian countries to immediately abolish blasphemy laws, here and now, is
too far-fetched. Indeed, even the Western civilization took centuries of gradual transformation
during the so-called Enlightenment period before introducing a change as radical as erasing,
or otherwise lessening, the importance of upholding the sanctity of religion in public
discourse. Such a change, shall it be desirable in a future Asia, is also something that a
government policy alone cannot partake; the profundity of the change is one that must be
coupled by a long-term education and social reforms. On the other hand, the paper does not
want to fall into the trap of cultural relativism by assuming that the culture is something
that is stagnant. The culture of Asia—and so do other cultures elsewhere—do and can
change. Criticism against the Asian practice of blasphemy laws should hence be treated not
as a civilizational attack, but rather as an impetus to diligently locate the drawbacks of the
current condition and, subsequently, exert efforts to find a middle ground, without sacrificing
the core principles that the concerned society deems fundamental.
How this middle ground manifests in concrete policy recommendations is a valuable
topic deserving of further study. In the following, the paper will outline several points of
suggestions that would hopefully stimulate such a future study. As a starting point, we must
recognize that Asian countries have different level of problems with regards to their
blasphemy law and hence assistance towards them must be tailored according to their need.
For example, some countries are still in the need of assistance in upholding the rule of law
in order to cope with the prevalence of extrajudicial killing related to blasphemy; others,
meanwhile, may have reached an optimal level of law-enforcement and hence efforts should
be more directed to ensure that the law being enforced are fair and proportional. Equally
important, a set of criteria should be formulated to make sure that the implementation of
blasphemy laws is free from misuse. These may include the improvement on the aspect of
clarity, predictability, and consistency of the law. Our case study on the Philippines provides
an example where the aspect of clarity is upheld: only an offence that occurred inside a
place of worship and not elsewhere is punishable by the law. No less salient is the issue of

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2019 4th Conference for Human Rights Leaders of the Next Generation - 23 -
non-discrimination, that is, the equal enforcement of the law to the adherents of all religion
without favoring one over the other, which is a principal requirement in international human
rights instrument towards the restriction of certain rights. A very important topic is also the
issue of how to decide whether a religious offence should or should not be punished. On
this, the so-called “Rabat Threshold Test” that is outlined by UN Human Rights Council is
a noteworthy reference. The Threshold Test recommends states to assess six points—context,
speaker, intent, content and form, publicity and likelihood of instigating disorder—before
deciding whether or not an offensive expression is punishable by the law. If the offence
does pass the test, then the last step is to make sure that punishment is proportional to the
offence—that the assigned penalty does not go beyond the set objectives of the law.
Conclusion
Religion is an important, almost inseparable feature to a large number of countries
in the Asian continent. This is reflected, among other things, in the prevalence of blasphemy
laws in the continent, which has sparked a lot of controversy in recent years. The paper has
attempted to explore the religious, social and legal dimension that revolves around the
implementation of blasphemy law in selected Asian countries. It is evident that an ongoing
conflict persists between their practice of prohibiting blasphemy and increased international
pressure, championed by proponents of liberal-Western values, to abolish their blasphemy
law. In response, the paper is in favor of a middle ground and it offers a careful discussion
on points that must be considered in formulating concrete policies towards such a middle
ground. These policies may indeed take a considerable duration of time to formulate, as the
historical experience of the Western Enlightenment period has exemplified. Nevertheless,
there is no doubt that it is a duration that the Asian nations should deem worthy to invest
in.

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