In a guest post, Professor Russell Sandberg looks at a rather unusual ruling by the Advertising Standards Authority.

The criminal offence of blasphemy is dead. It was unceremoniously abolished by section 79(1) of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008. My colleague Norman Doe and I wrote a piece entitled ‘The Strange Death of Blasphemy’, which looked at events leading up to its abolition. The offence is now long dead. 

Yet as we mentioned in the conclusion to that piece, in some respects blasphemy, or at least blasphemy-like provisions, live on. There, we speculated on how other criminal law offences provided some degree of protection on grounds of religion. In addition to this, other non-criminal provisions are rather blasphemy-like, such as rules and guidelines that regulate the media and advertising.

A recent ruling of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) provides a stark and worrying example of this. Continue reading →