A Letter to the Editor of Wall Street Journal by Floyd Abrams. Abrams is an expert on constitutional law, and many arguments in the briefs he has written before the United States Supreme Court have been adopted as United States Constitutional interpretative.

Regarding the Nov. 12 letter from Assistant Secretary of State P.J. Crowley (“U.S. Defends Freedom of Expression”) defending the sponsorship by the U.S., together with Egypt, of a resolution in the U.N. Human Rights Council denouncing any “negative religious stereotyping” that constitutes “incitement to discrimination”:

Mr. Crowley’s letter ignores the dangers to free expression inherent in any such resolution.

It is perfectly true, as Mr. Crowley observes, that the U.S. continues to oppose any resolution (and the U.N. has already adopted many of them) seeking to impose direct legal sanctions against what has been referred to as “defamation of religion.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has spoken out unequivocally against such efforts and the Obama administration has already cast the first of what is likely to be many votes against such efforts.

The problem is that the resolution the U.S. supported can too easily be used to justify the very attempts at speech suppression that we otherwise opposed. The resolution is studiously ambiguous, a trait that sometimes serves the international community but disserves all in the area of free speech. Everything about the resolution is hazy. We cannot know what negative “religious stereotyping” will be construed as meaning. Would it include, as Stuart Taylor has asked, statements that “the world’s most dangerous terrorists are Islamists?” Will it be read to include much of the recent discussions in the press about the religious fanaticism of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan? Nor can we know what “incitement to discrimination” will be understood to mean or whether either of the two examples I have just cited would or could be read to meet that standard.

What we do know is that the many nations in the world that still treat blasphemy as a crime, mostly states that treat Islam as a state religion, will hardly shy away from treating banned books such as Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” as the most threatening of incitements.

Most threatening of all, what will the language be treated as meaning that “urges States to take effective measures, consistent with their obligations under international human-rights law, to address and combat” negative religious sterotyping and advocacy of “religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination”? Whatever international human-rights law may be understood to require (and the recent Goldstone Report provides little comfort in that respect), it certainly is not the same or even close to the far more permissive and protective First Amendment.

So the question is this: Has the U.S. government really signed on to a resolution that may plausibly be read to urge or even to seek to require our own nation to substitute international norms that permit the suppression of speech for our own?

For more, read here.