Susan Benesch (born 1964) is an American journalist and scholar of speech who is known for founding the Dangerous Speech Project. Benesch is a free speech advocate, recommending the use of counterspeech rather than censorship to delegitimize harmful speech.
Benesch was born in 1964 in New York. She is of Czech ancestry on her father's side, and her family was described as "upper-middle class". [1] [2] Benesch described herself as descending from "immigrants, refugees and people who were killed because other people had been taught to hate them". [3]
After graduating from Columbia University, [4] she worked in journalism, including as staff writer for the Miami Herald in Haiti and St. Petersburg Times ' correspondent in Latin America. She is fluent in Spanish. [1] [5] Benesch earned a JD at Yale in 2001 and an LL.M. from Georgetown University Law Center in 2008. [6] [7]
Benesch worked for the NGOs Amnesty International and Human Rights First, and is currently the faculty associate of Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. [6] [7] She is also an adjunct professor at American University. [8]
She founded the Dangerous Speech Project in 2010 with a grant from the MacArthur Foundation. [3] [9]
In regulating "dangerous speech", Benesch seeks to minimize the harm to freedom of speech, and advocates the use of counterspeech over censorship. Counterspeech means responding to hate speech with empathy and challenging the hate narratives, rather than responding with more hate speech directed in the opposite direction. According to Benesch, counterspeech is more likely to result in deradicalization and peaceful resolution of conflict. [10] Counterspeech, which seeks to delegitimize rather than stifle harmful speech, can often incorporate humor. [3] In contrast, she believes that censorship is ineffective at stopping hate narratives. For example, a South African politician was convicted for hate speech for singing the Shoot the Boer song, but his supporters sang the song shortly after the conviction. [11] Benesch is a critic of United States president Donald Trump, saying that he operates in a gray area of "dangerous speech" such as when he suggested that supporters should use the Second Amendment on Hillary Clinton. She describes Trump as "undermining the extent to which his supporters trust the essential institutions and practices of U.S. democracy", which she finds "deeply irresponsible". [3]
In a 2008 article, "Vile Crime or Inalienable Right: Defining Incitement to Genocide", she proposed a "Reasonably Probable Consequences test" for criminalizing incitement to genocide: [12]
Although he found the article "thought-provoking", Gregory Gordon criticized it as he favors a broader approach to criminalizing what he terms "atrocity speech", and because he believed that her criteria do not incorporate the precedent of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. In response to Gordon's criticism she revised her test in "The Ghost of Causation in International Speech Crime Cases". [12]
A hate crime is crime where a perpetrator targets a victim because of their physical appearance or perceived membership of a certain social group.
Hate speech is a term with varied meaning and has no single, consistent definition. It is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation". The Encyclopedia of the American Constitution states that hate speech is "usually thought to include communications of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation". There is no single definition of what constitutes "hate" or "disparagement". Legal definitions of hate speech vary from country to country.
Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), nicknamed "Radio Genocide" was a Rwandan radio station which broadcast from July 8, 1993, to July 31, 1994. It played a significant role in inciting the Rwandan genocide that took place from April to July 1994, and has been described by some scholars as having been a de facto arm of the Hutu government.
Simon Bikindi was a Rwandan musician and singer who was formerly very popular in Rwanda. His patriotic and nationalist songs were playlist staples on the national radio station Radio Rwanda during the Rwandan Civil War. For his actions during the Rwandan genocide, he was tried and convicted for incitement to genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in 2008. He died of diabetes at a Beninese hospital in December 2018.
Incitement to ethnic or racial hatred is a crime under the laws of several countries.
Freedom of speech is the concept of the inherent human right to voice one's opinion publicly without fear of censorship or punishment. "Speech" is not limited to public speaking and is generally taken to include other forms of expression. The right is preserved in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and is granted formal recognition by the laws of most nations. Nonetheless, the degree to which the right is upheld in practice varies greatly from one nation to another. In many nations, particularly those with authoritarian forms of government, overt government censorship is enforced. Censorship has also been claimed to occur in other forms and there are different approaches to issues such as hate speech, obscenity, and defamation laws.
Speech crimes are certain kinds of speech that are criminalized by promulgated laws or rules. Criminal speech is a direct preemptive restriction on freedom of speech, and the broader concept of freedom of expression.
Hate media is media that contributes to the demonization and stigmatization of people who belong to different groups. It has played an influential role in the incitement to genocide, with notable examples of it being Radio Televizija Srbije during the wars in Yugoslavia, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) during the Rwandan genocide, and Nazi Germany's Der Stürmer newspaper.
Richard Ashby Wilson is an American–British social anthropologist of law and human rights. He is the Gladstein Distinguished professor of Human Rights and Professor of Anthropology and Law at the University of Connecticut. In 2021, Wilson became the Associate Dean of Faculty Development and Intellectual Life at the University of Connecticut School of Law. Wilson established the interdisciplinary Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut and was the Director of the Human Rights Institute from 2003 to 2013. Wilson is one of the founders of the anthropology of human rights and was editor and an author of Human Rights, Culture and Context (1997), the first edited volume in the field of the anthropology of human rights.
Online hate speech is a type of speech that takes place online with the purpose of attacking a person or a group based on their race, religion, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, disability, and/or gender. Online hate speech is not easily defined, but can be recognized by the degrading or dehumanizing function it serves.
Deplatforming, also called no-platforming, is a form of Internet censorship of an individual or group by preventing them from posting on the platforms they use to share their information/ideas. This typically involves suspension, outright bans, or reducing spread.
Stochastic terrorism is a form of political violence instigated by hostile public rhetoric directed at a group or an individual. Unlike incitement to terrorism, stochastic terrorism is accomplished with indirect, vague or coded language, which grants the instigator plausible deniability for any associated violence. A key element of stochastic terrorism is the use of media for propagation, where the person carrying out the violence may not have direct connection to any other users of violent rhetoric.
Incitement to genocide is a crime under international law which prohibits inciting (encouraging) the commission of genocide. An extreme form of hate speech, incitement to genocide is an inchoate offense and is theoretically subject to prosecution even if genocide does not occur, although charges have never been brought in an international court without mass violence having occurred. "Direct and public incitement to commit genocide" was forbidden by the Genocide Convention in 1948. Incitement to genocide is often cloaked in metaphor and euphemism and may take many forms beyond direct advocacy, including dehumanization and accusation in a mirror.
Gregory S. Gordon is an American professor and scholar of international law and former Legal Officer for the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICTR. Gordon is known for his academic work calling for the criminalization under international law of a broader category of speech likely to cause and/or fuel mass atrocities, and his book Atrocity Speech Law: Foundation, Fragmentation, Fruition in which he advances this argument.
Counterspeech is a tactic of countering hate speech or misinformation by presenting an alternative narrative rather than with censorship of the offending speech. It also means responding to hate speech with empathy and challenging the hate narratives, rather than responding with more hate speech directed in the opposite direction. According to advocates, counterspeech is more likely to result in deradicalization and peaceful resolution of conflict.
International speech crimes are acts of speech which are criminalized under international law. Incitement to genocide is one example, but the Nuremberg trials and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted some defendants of crimes against humanity based on speech acts. For example, Serb politician Vojislav Šešelj was indicted for crimes against humanity, including "war propaganda and incitement of hatred towards non-Serb people". Serbian politician Radovan Karadžić was convicted of "participating in a joint criminal enterprise to commit crimes against humanity on the basis of his public speeches and broadcasts". Dario Kordić and Radoslav Brđanin were also convicted of crimes based on instigating violence in public speeches.
Hate speech is public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation. Hate speech is "usually thought to include communications of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, colour, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation".
Genocide justification is the claim that a genocide is morally excusable/defensible, necessary, and/or sanctioned by law. Genocide justification differs from genocide denial, which is an attempt to reject the occurrence of genocide. Perpetrators often claim that genocide victims presented a serious threat, justifying their actions by stating it was legitimate self-defense of a nation or state. According to modern international criminal law, there can be no excuse for genocide. Genocide is often camouflaged as military activity against combatants, and the distinction between denial and justification is often blurred.
Predictions of a genocide in Ethiopia, particularly one that targets Tigrayans, Amharas and/or Oromos, have frequently occurred during the 2020s, particularly in the context of the Tigray War and Ethiopia's broader civil conflict.
Accusation in a mirror (AiM) is a technique often used in the context of hate speech incitement, where one falsely attributes one's own motives and/or intentions to one's adversaries. It has been cited, along with dehumanization, as one of the indirect or cloaked forms of incitement to genocide, which has contributed to the commission of genocide, for example in the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and the Armenian genocide. By invoking collective self-defense, accusation in a mirror is used to justify genocide, similar to self-defense as a defense for individual homicide.
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