The Albanian government plans to introduce a new legal framework to ban the activities of what it calls hate preachers, amid concerns about extremist influences following the Bondi Beach terror attack.
First highlighted last week, the government has now named the specific groups it plans to target with the updated hate speech legislation: neo-Nazi organizations and radical cleric groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said on Tuesday: “We want to ensure that those hate preachers who have managed to stay on the legal side of Australian law will lower the threshold so that the speech that any reasonable Australian would have considered abhorrent and which has no place in Australia will become criminal.”
“Similarly, for organizations like Hizb ut-Tahrir and the neo-Nazis who have only adhered to the legal side of Australian law, but never to the side of the Australian community… the thresholds will be lowered to allow them to be listed as organizations under a new regime.”
While details on how these groups will be restricted are limited so far, Burke said that “the intent of the legislation is to be able to stop them from operating.”
“Some of the consequences that currently apply to organizations listed as terrorist organizations would in fact be almost exactly the same here,” he added.
“We want these organizations not to operate. They hate Australia.”
Hizb ut-Tahrir is a global Islamic political party founded in 1953.
“’Tahrir’ means liberation and the name is indicative of our work, which involves liberating the Muslim world first intellectually, then politically, economically and in all other respects from the subjugation of kufr (disbelief) and its people,” according to the party’s Australian webpage.
“Although we in the West are not working to change the system of government, we intellectually promote Islam as the only way of life ordained by the Creator, Allah.”
The government is facing pressure from critics who say it has not done enough to curb the surge in anti-Semitism since October 2023.
Officials say the proposed regime would allow authorities to list organizations that promote hatred even if they do not meet the legal definition of terrorism.
#Albanian #government #names #groups #crack #context #antihate #speech