| Submit your comments on this article |
| Europe |
| Another Prosecution To Protect God From Insults |
| 2005-01-23 |
| An Athens court banned a comic book portraying Jesus Christ as a drug-abusing loser whose miracles happen by luck rather than divine intervention and sentenced its author to six months in jail for insulting religion, his lawyer said on Thursday. The book's Austrian author Gerhard Haderer did not attend the trial and the court suspended the sentence, which he would have been able to pay off with a fine had he been in court. The book's Greek publishers and four local booksellers were acquitted but the court upheld a ban on The Life of Jesus, which was removed by police from book shops in February 2003 on the orders of the prosecution. A separate case on the book's seizure is pending in Greece's Supreme Court. "If the ban is not lifted, we'll consider appealing to the European Court of Human Rights," Haderer's lawyer Minas Mihailovic said. "It's a pity, we had distributed 2 000 copies and the album can still not be sold in Greece," said Nikos Hatzopoulos, who runs the book's Greek publishing company Oxy. The crackdown on the book was condemned by the Geneva-based International Publishers' Association (IPA) but welcomed by Greece's powerful and conservative Orthodox Church. "It's a shame because in other countries where religion is stricter, like Portugal or Austria, there was criticism but there was no ban," Hatzopoulos said. The Life of Jesus has been published in Germany, France, South Korea, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Hungary and in Haderer's native Austria, where it sold 80 000 copies. Another book, an erotic Greek novel, was provisionally seized in Greece in 2000 after pressure from the church which condemned it as "blasphemous". |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #1 Well, there's a shocker. Not about the prosecution for "insulting religion," but that the religion isn't islam. |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2005-01-23 11:15:30 PM |