High-profile comedians paid handsomely to not offend Saudi royals at Riyadh Comedy Festival

Plus: Man, now pardoned, initially sentenced to death for criticizing Tunisia’s president

Riyadh Comedy Festival, 2024, via Shutterstock.com

Last year, FIRE launched the Free Speech Dispatch, a regular series covering new and continuing censorship trends and challenges around the world. Our goal is to help readers better understand the global context of free expression. Want to make sure you don’t miss an update? Sign up for our newsletter.

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Saudi government takes short break from jailing and torturing critics to host Riyadh Comedy Festival

Comedy’s greatest asset is its ability to use just laughter to take the powerful down a peg. But what took place in Saudi Arabia earlier this month wasn’t so funny.

Over 50 well-known comedians including Bill Burr, Kevin Hart, and Dave Chappelle all performed in recent weeks at the Riyadh Comedy Festival, despite criticism from some fellow comics who were also invited — and offered large sums to perform — but said no. One of those comedians, Atsuko Okatsuka, shared a reason why she chose to reject the offer: It came with very restrictive strings attached.

A contract Okatsuka posted on social media said participants couldn’t make jokes that degrade, embarrass, or ridicule the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, its leadership and public figures, “the Saudi royal family and legal system,” and “any religion” or “religious figure.”

Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority certainly looks to have enforced the rules. Two comedians were dropped from the lineup after making comments about how they were still willing to accept the money despite the country’s extensive human rights violations, because in doing so they acknowledged said violations. That’s a no-no. Jim Jefferies was cut after saying on a podcast, “One reporter was killed by the government — unfortunate, but not a fucking hill that I’m gonna die on.” Similarly, Tim Dillon, while on a podcast responding to critics of his participation, was removed for the comment, “So what if they have slaves, they’re paying me enough to look the other way.”

And even though Saudi Arabia has tortured and imprisoned government critics — including American citizens — and brutally executed journalist Jamal Khashoggi just for engaging in the kind of speech that these comedians were paid handsomely to avoid, some of the performers are still singing the praises of the event. Burr said the “royals loved the show” (the one at which they were contractually exempt from mockery) and “to their credit,” they negotiated the speech restrictions down to “Don’t make fun of royals [and] religion.”

Chappelle, too, said on stage that “in America, they say that if you talk about Charlie Kirk, that you’ll get canceled,” and that it’s “easier to talk here than it is in America.” Chappelle isn’t wrong that comments about Kirk in the aftermath of his assassination led to a disturbing trend of firings and punishments across the country bolstered by threats and demands from lawmakers, one FIRE is working to combat. And he’s right to be worried about the state of free speech in the United States. I certainly am.

But I’d encourage Chappelle, who made a significant amount of money directly from the government which he was forbidden to criticize at his show, to speak to the country’s journalists, apostates, women’s rights activists, writers, and teachers about his assertion that Saudi Arabia is a freer place to speak. That might be difficult, though, since so many have been imprisoned or even executed by authorities.

UK judge backs ‘right to offend’ in reversal of Quran burning conviction

In one of the more disturbing free speech stories of this summer, I wrote in June about a Westminster Magistrates’ Court guilty finding against asylum seeker Hamit Coskun for publicly burning a Quran in London. Most alarming was the judge’s justification for the religiously aggravated public order offense conviction. The “disorderly” nature of Coskun’s protest, he asserted, “is no better illustrated than by the fact that it led to serious public disorder involving him being assaulted by two different people.” Not great.

But this month, his conviction was overturned, a much-needed win both for Coskun and for the UK’s flailing speech rights. Justice Joel Nathan Bennathan said that, though Quran burning is deeply offensive to many, free expression “must include the right to express views that offend, shock or disturb.”

Dropped Graham Linehan case may signal UK policing shift

And Graham Linehan — the target of a high-profile arrest at Heathrow Airport for a series of posts on X, including one where he said if “a trans-identified male is in a female-only space…call the cops, and if all else fails, punch him in the balls” — says he’s now in the clear. Linehan, a comedy writer, wrote on X that “police have informed my lawyers that I face no further action in respect of the arrest at Heathrow in September,” but he intends to pursue legal action for wrongful arrest.

There’s more: In the wake of the dropped charges against Linehan, the UK’s Metropolitan Police said they “will no longer investigate non-crime hate incidents” to “provide clearer direction for officers, reduce ambiguity and enable them to focus on matters that meet the threshold for criminal investigations.”

Other speech news out of the UK hasn’t been so rosy

• Imgur is no longer available in the UK after the company decided to block users in the country from its services following a threat of fines from the Information Commissioner’s Office. But the ICO says that’s not the end of the story. “We have been clear that exiting the UK does not allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law, and our investigation remains ongoing,” interim executive director Tim Capel warned.

• The UK is still trying to undermine Apple’s encryption, despite some reports that the government backed off this summer. The UK Home Office is reportedly pushing yet again for access to UK Apple users’ iCloud backups.

• Anti-abortion activist Rose Docherty was arrested late last month for violating Scotland’s Safe Access Zones Act by holding a sign that read “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want” outside Queen Elizabeth University Hospital. This is Docherty’s second arrest under the law. She received a warning after the first.

• It’s unclear if he will ultimately be charged, but a North Yorkshire blogger and activist was arrested last month under the UK’s Public Order Act for allegedly stirring racial hatred on social media. Police visited his home, and then took him in for questioning late at night, for posting on X an image of the Palestinian flag overlaid with the message, “F-ck Palestine. F-ck Hamas. F-ck Islam. Want to protest? F-ck off to Muslim country & protest.”

• An Oxford student was arrested and suspended from his university for comments he made at a rally in London this month. Metropolitan Police arrested him for inciting racial hatred for sharing a chant he said he had been workshopping: “Gaza, Gaza make us proud, put the Zios in the ground.”

• Mass arrests of protesters against the ban on activist group Palestine Action continue. In the first weekend of this month alone, nearly 500 protesters were taken in for “supporting a proscribed organisation.” This is how far the crackdown has extended: A man who held up a magazine cover with reporting about the arrests of people holding up “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” signs was also arrested on the same charges under the Terrorism Act 2000. And a woman claims she was arrested in London for holding up a sign that doesn’t express support for the group but instead said, “I do not support the proscription of Palestine Action.”

• Restrictions on protests over the Palestine Action ban are likely to grow. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced that police will be given broadened authority to take into account the “cumulative impact of frequent protests” when placing conditions on demonstrations. Mahmood said the right to protest “must be balanced with the freedom of their neighbors to live their lives without fear.”

• And that’s not all. Prime Minister Keir Starmer suggested Mahmood will “look more broadly at what other powers are available,” specifically “in relation to some of the chants that are going on at some of these protests.” Starmer is presumably referring to chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which have been criminalized in some nations.

Tunisia sentenced a man, now pardoned, to death for criticizing the president

Censorship doesn’t get more extreme than this: A Tunisian court sentenced a man to die this month, just for Facebook posts about President Kais Saied. He was released after pressure from human rights groups secured a presidential pardon from Saied, but the initial sentence alone is deeply shocking. And it will no doubt be a warning to other government critics within Tunisia that severe punishment may await them — but whether they can count on a pardon is less certain.

AI-altered horror, a campaign against negativity, and more censorship news out of China

• A film censorship first? Cuts and deletions from movies and other media to gain approval for release in China are certainly nothing new, but this may be: the likely use of AI to change the content of a film. The depiction of a same-sex wedding in horror movie Together, featuring Dave Franco and Alison Brie, was edited so that one of the two men being married was altered into a woman. To its credit, the film’s global distributor Neon said it “does not approve” of the Chinese distributor’s changes and “demanded they cease distributing this altered version.”

• Cui Jianchun, from the Hong Kong office of China’s foreign ministry, met with new U.S. Consul General to Hong Kong and Macau Julie Eadeh to scold her for associating with pro-democracy activists and provide a list of “four don’ts.” She was warned “not to meet people she ‘shouldn’t meet with,’ not to collude with ‘anti-China forces,’ not to assist or fund activities that might undermine the city’s stability and not to interfere with national security cases in Hong Kong.”

• China’s Cyberspace Administration is warning social media platforms: Limit negative posts, or else. It’s part of a new campaign from the government to crack down on online comments that “excessively exaggerate negative and pessimistic sentiments.” High on the list of targets will be posts, primarily from the country’s youth, expressing dour feelings about their present and future prospects.

• Journalist Zhang Zhan, already jailed once for her early reporting on what would become the Covid-19 pandemic, has been sentenced to four years in prison for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a charge commonly used to punish government critics. Her newest conviction is based on her human rights activism.

• A massive leak has shed light on the workings of China’s Great Firewall, including its disturbing spread to other nations. The files show that Chinese tech company Geedge Networks “has provided entire network censorship and surveillance systems to internet service providers in countries including Myanmar, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and Ethiopia, as well as some unnamed countries, essentially replicating China’s model of digital authoritarianism on a global scale.”

• Exiled Hong Kong activist Nathan Law was not permitted entry to Singapore, a rejection he says is politically motivated. In a statement, a spokesperson for Singapore’s government “noted that Hong Kong police have issued a warrant for Law’s arrest under the city’s National Security Law.”

Blasphemy can be a matter of life and death

Moroccan feminist Ibtissame Lachgar found no relief this month against the blasphemy charge against her, and her 30-month sentence was upheld despite her lawyers’ objections that imprisonment would put her at risk of amputation because of her cancer diagnosis. Lachgar had posted a photo of herself wearing an “Allah is lesbian” shirt with the caption that “like any religious ideology,” Islam is “fascist, phallocratic and misogynistic.” Prosecutors aren’t satisfied with the current sentence and are pushing for an even longer jail term, citing the “spiritual well-being of Moroccans.”

Apurbo Pal, a student at Bangladesh’s North South University, was taken by police after a mob violently assaulted him over viral Facebook posts accusing him of “insulting the Quran.” Pal had to be taken to the hospital, and he is likely to face charges.

And in Nigeria, home to both some of the worst mob violence against and aggressive prosecutions of blasphemers, the Supreme Court is hearing the appeal of musician Yahaya Sharif-Aminu, originally sentenced to death for sharing blasphemous lyrics in a WhatsApp group. Advocates are closely watching the case, as the decision could be significant — for good or ill. A lawyer for the Kano State government, which is pursuing the charges against Sharif-Aminu, said he “made blasphemous statements against the Holy Prophet, which the government of Kano State will not condone” and if the lower court’s ruling is upheld, “we will execute him publicly.”

Thai police arrest Australian writer over Malaysian government’s defamation claims

Australian scholar, writer, and Thailand resident Murray Hunter is alleging transnational repression after his arrest at Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok. Thai authorities detained him on defamation charges that Hunter says originate from the Malaysian government. Case documents viewed by the Associated Press identified the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission “as the victim in the case but said the complainant was a person staying at a hotel in Bangkok whom it did not name.” He spent a night in prison and must appear in court next month. Hunter warned, “If this can happen to me, any journalists now, where a body in another country makes a complaint against them to the Thai police, could have the same consequences and be picked off a flight and put in a lockup.”

The latest in tech and media

• Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, the online safety regulator FIRE has covered before, ordered X and Meta to take down three videos depicting killings or face severe fines. Platforms that fail to take the videos — which show the stabbing of Iryna Zarutska in North Carolina, Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and the beheading of a man in Dallas — face “threats of fines of $825,000 per day for each offending post.”

• The Karnataka High Court rejected X’s legal challenge against the Indian government’s use of a central online tool to order content takedowns, one X called a “censorship portal.” The judge ruling in the case defended the portal, calling it a “public good,” and said social media sites can’t be “left in a state of anarchic freedom.”

• The Turkish Radio and Television Supreme Council is on the hunt to defend what it deems “family values,” and streaming services are paying the price. Streamers including Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, and more were issued fines for offering films that allegedly “promote homosexuality,” “disregard family values,” and “conflict with the shared values of society.” All of the films the council objected to were removed from streaming in the country.