The nature of fundamental and human rights are universal and they preponderate the social, political and private lives of people. Opinions, perceptions and viewpoints differ with reference to what one perceives and believe but they form an integral part of the expression of one’s own self. And this is why freedom of speech and expression feature as an essential human right.

But rights pertaining to expression of oneself and freedom of speech are demarcated when they come into the sphere of religion. Sensitivity and profundity of religions delimit these rights and considers them as anti-religious and belligerent. Religion and intellect are not parallel to each other and are antithetical. So rights remain at the periphery and any expression concerning one belief’s pertaining to this is sacrilegious.

This is a commonplace experience which writers, authors, painters and now in the modernist scenario, cartoonists face. In the current situation cartoonists especially of Denmark are facing condemnation for their alleged reprints of the Prophet Mohammad’s cartoons by Kurt Westergaard in the Danish newspapers, including Jyllands-Posten. The caricature depicting Prophet Mohammad wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a lit fuse had earlier amounted to an insurmountable vehemence and rancour from the Islamic religious sects all around the world.

But the reprints again have led to a series of detentions, deportations and expulsions of the suspects who have allegedly threatened the newspaper and the cartoonists to be killed. But the newspaper is still standing as an upholder of the truth and an agency which respects the freedom of speech.

It is although an audacious attempt on part of the newspaper to print these caricatures but as the editor of the newspaper Berlingske Tidende says:

We are doing this to document what is at stake in this case, and to unambiguously back and support the freedom of speech that we as a newspaper will always defend.

But the question again arises that how far the people and the religious sects of the world are willing to accommodate this freedom of human right.

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