An annual US government human rights report has described the human rights situation as having “worsened” over the past year in a number of European countries, including the UK.
The 2024 Country Reports on Human Rights found the human rights situation to have deteriorated in major EU nations, Germany and France, while noting controversies elsewhere such as Romania’s annulled presidential election vote.
Despite ongoing clashes between the Trump administration and the Irish government in relation to freedom of expression, the US country report for Ireland observed that there were “no significant changes in the human rights situation” during the year, saying of the Government that it took “credible steps to identify and punish officials who committed human rights abuses”.
In its country report for the United Kingdom, the US Department of State attributed the downgrade to “significant human rights issues,” listing “credible reports” of restrictions on freedom of expression; enforcement of or threat of criminal or civil laws in order to limit expression; and crimes, including violent crimes, “motivated by antisemitism”.
“The government sometimes took credible steps to identify and punish officials who committed human rights abuses, but prosecution and punishment for such abuses was inconsistent,” the executive summary reads.
Areas of concern were discussed under Section 2 of the report, Liberty, which encompassed freedom of the press and official censorship attempts.
Restrictions on political speech designated “hateful” or “offensive,” as well as speech within “Public Spaces Protections Orders” areas and “Safe Access Zones” were identified as threatening free expression, including even in cases of prayer and silent protest.
In October last year, a man in the UK was convicted after praying silently in an abortion exclusion zone in Bournemouth and ordered to pay £9,000 in legal costs to the prosecution.
The ruling was described by one advocacy group as “the first known conviction of a ‘thoughtcrime’ in modern British history”.
British law enabled authorities, including the Office of Communications (Ofcom), to “monitor all forms of communication for speech they deemed ‘illegal’,” the report found, adding that the Online Safety Act of 2023 defined the category of “online harm” and “expressly expanded Ofcom’s authority to include American media and technology firms with a substantial number of British users, regardless of whether they had a corporate presence in the UK”.
“Under the law, companies were required to engage in proactive ‘illegal content risk assessment’ to mitigate the risk of users encountering speech deemed illegal by Ofcom”, the State Department said, adding that it potentially threatened encryption capabilities, and therefore user privacy.
The fallout of the Southport stabbing, which saw British citizen of Rwandan origins Axel Rudakubana stab three girls to death and injure more, is highlighted in the report, primarily because of local and national government’s repeated attempts to “chill speech as to the identity and motives of the attacker”.
“While many media observers deemed ‘two-tier’ enforcement of these laws following the Southport attacks an especially grievous example of government censorship, censorship of ordinary Britons was increasingly routine, often targeted at political speech” the report reads, before pointing to the case of a man given an eight-week sentence for posting a meme relating to a link between migrants and knife crime.
Under a later section, Acts of Antisemitism and Antisemitic Incitement, the US also made the case that there was a rise in crime, violence and the threat of violence motivated by antisemitism since October 2023, citing British Home Office data which indicated a doubling of antisemitic attacks (to 3,282 incidents) in the first three months of the year 2024, compared to 2023.
EU giants France and Germany both came under fire in the report in relation to limits placed on free expression, as well as in relation to incidents, both violent and otherwise, perceived to be motivated by antisemitism.
In France’s case, the report says that French hate speech law made it easier for authorities to “block or delist websites promoting hate speech” and to accelerate legal proceedings against them, while in Germany, the government was deemed to have imposed limits on the speech of groups it deemed “extremist”.
German law required social networks go beyond assessing and potentially restricting “illegal content” but also to report “online hate crimes, including antisemitic hate speech,” to the police.
“By law, authorities treated online threats the same as in-person threats, and threats of rape and vandalism – whether online or in person – the same as threats of homicide,” the report reads.
The actions of the German federal police were criticised in the report, the authorities accused of having “routinely raided homes, confiscated electronic devices, interrogated suspects and prosecuted individuals for the exercise of freedom of speech, including online”. OSCE data noted an increase of almost 10,000 hate crimes recorded by the country between 2019 and 2023, the latest year for which data is available.
Attention was given to police raids around the time of International Women’s Day, targeting 45 individuals across Germany as part of an effort to “combat misogyny on the internet;” an effort that saw 37 other individuals in the months leading up to the raids searched and interrogated.
“Authorities accused these individuals of crimes ranging from advocating or threatening sexual violence against women to making comments about female politicians and generalized insults against women,” it said.