Is advocating for something legal in the UK?

[Guest]

Is advocating for the legalization of something legal in the UK? For example, if someone posted online saying they think incest between adult siblings should be legalized is that likely to result in an arrest?

[PallasAthena]

Pressure groups advocate and campaign for changes in the law, to legalise something that is currently illegal, all the time and you have freedom of speech rights unde Article 10 of the Human Rights Act although those rights are not unlimited. But how you advocate may matter more than what you advocate.

It's legal in principle to advocate changes in the law. That doesn't mean that advocating for certain activities might not fall foul of some other law, depending what it is and how the advocacy is carried out. Campaigning for a change in the law is one thing, inciting people to break the law in the meantime as part of that campaign probably isn't.

And in practice the amount of public support for for a campaign will influence whether the police take an interest. Campaigners for legalising sex with children for example (and such organisations did exist in the 1970s) would likely find themselves in difficulty quite quickly. (That group got prosecuted for "corrupting public morals").

Even if legal that doesn't mean online sites have to permit you to advocate on their site. They are private organisations with their own T&C and are entitled to boot you off if they don't like what you are advocating.

[Guest]

Does saying an illegal action is good count as inciting people to commit that action?

[PallasAthena]

Sorry, I've no idea. There's probably no simple yes/no answer to that.

Is your question merely hypothtetical or has it actually happened to you? If so please give us the back story.

[Guest]

It's a hypothetical. I'm from the US where speech protections are much more broad so I was curious what the laws were like in the UK. In the us advocating for any crime to be legalized is legal no matter how depraved the crime is. We don't have exceptions for if speech is very offensive so a politician in the us could campaign for pedophilia and the government would have no way of stopping him. Do you have any legal experience as a lawyer? I know that in the us saying a criminal act is good does not count as incitement because it's expressing a belief, I thought that it doesn't count as incitement in the UK either but now I'm not sure.

I am concerned over the law criminalizing offensive speech since that could apply to basically anything, so I'm not sure how I could reliably prevent myself from commiting this crime other than never posting anything online. I won't be in the UK anytime soon but I do visit sometimes.

[Guest]

I think it only counts as incitement in the us if you are encouraging a person to commit a specific act of violence against a specific identifiable person. So posting online telling people to kill people of a certain ethnicity might be legal. I'm not sure though and I don't intend to test it out as I'm not a psychopath.

[Guest]

Or violence against a place like a specific government building

[atticus]

People have successfully advocated inthe UK for the legalisation of things like homosexuality, abortion, gay marriage.

[Guest]

Atticus, do you think saying a criminal act is good is the same as inciting people to break that law? I don't see how it could be.

[PallasAthena]

I think it only counts as incitement in the us if you are encouraging a person to commit a specific act of violence against a specific identifiable person. So posting online telling people to kill people of a certain ethnicity might be legal. I'm not sure though and I don't intend to test it out as I'm not a psychopath.

Definitely not legal in the UK. There are specific offences of inciting hatred against people on the basis of their race, religion, or sexual orientation.

Inciting hatred | College of Policing

[atticus]

Saying something should be legalised and saying it is good are different things. Take drug use for example, or gun ownership. Neither are good.

[echat11]

Sounds like a US law student, probably one of those 'compare and contrast' questions.
10 out of 10 for research.