ABSTRACT
The first decade of the twenty-first century put freedom of speech and its limits into a novel spotlight both in Europe and in the United States. The prosecution of Anders Breivik in Norway and the new wave of racist speech associated with his manifesto; virulent anti-migrant populism and Islamophobia in the EU; religious obscurantism and homophobic pickets at the funerals of US soldiers; criminalisation of Armenian genocide denial in France; drastic Western tendencies to combat glorification of terrorism; divergent positions on Nazi and Communist symbols; caricatures of the Prophet Mohamed vis-à-vis media freedom; recurrent instances of anti-Semitism and anti-Gypsyism; authoritarian slide and the deterioration of the free speech climate in Hungary; liberalisation of the pornographic market in Central and Eastern Europe; as well as the 2013 proposal to ban pornography on the Internet at the European Parliament – these are but a few of the episodes attracting media attention in recent years.
