COPENHAGEN, March 16, 2006 (IslamOnline.net) Denmark's top prosecutor decided on Wednesday, March 15, not to press charges against the country's mass-circulation daily over commissioning and printing cartoons mocking Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessing be upon him).
"I have today decided not to institute criminal proceedings in the case of Jyllands-Posten's article 'The Face of Muhammad', published on Sept. 30," Prosecutor General Henning Fode said in a statement, a copy of which was obtained by IslamOnline.net.
Twelve cartoons, including one showing the Prophet with a bomb-shaped turban, were first published by the daily in September and later reprinted by several newspapers worldwide on claims of freedom of expression.
A number of Danish Muslims and organizations have taken their case to the prosecutor general after the local attorney general in the city of Viborg, the seat of the High Court for Jutland, a peninsula in northern Europe that forms the mainland part of Denmark, rejected the case.
The drawings, considered blasphemous under Islam, have triggered massive and sometimes violent demonstrations across the Muslim world.
Qassem Said, the media officer of the Scandinavian Waqfs, Denmark's main Muslim body, told IOL on January 8 that the Muslim minority would take the case to the EU human rights commission if rejected in Denmark.
It was not immediately clear after the attorney general's decision that the minority would do that.
Expression
Fode said the mass-circulation daily did not violate the Danish freedom of expression laws by commissioning and printing the cartoons.
Explaining his ruling, he said eight of the drawings were either neutral or meant no scorn or irony.
Other two caricatures tackled the status of women in Muslim societies, which were in no violation of Danish laws on religious desecration, said the attorney general.
Fode added that another Jyllands-Posten's caricature discussed what he described as "violence in Islam or among Muslims."
He further said that the drawing portraying Prophet Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban might be referring to terrorism, extremists who carry out terrorist acts in the name of Islam or to violence based on grounds of wars fought by the Prophet against those "who don't embrace Islam."
The Danish the attorney general even argued that "the religious writings of Islam cannot be said to contain a general and absolute prohibition against drawing the prophet Muhammad."
EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and European External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner recently suggested that the EU and the Organization of the Islamic Conference co-draft a UN resolution promoting religious tolerance.
The OIC and the Arab League, the Muslim world's two main political bodies, are seeking a UN resolution, backed by possible sanctions, to protect religions following the publication of the provocative cartoons.
Muslim dignitaries and organizations have also called for the enactment of an international law banning the publication of any insults to religious symbols and values.
Welcomed
The prosecutor-general's decision drew an immediate welcome from the daily.
"It's a very satisfying decision that the prosecutor has reached," Jyllands-Posten's editor Carsten Juste told Danish news agency Ritzau.
Jyllands-Posten has always defended its action as being in accordance with the freedom of expression principle entrenched in the Danish constitution.
It has repeatedly apologized for offending Muslims but not for the publication of the cartoons.
Juste had earlier claimed that the press was giving Muslims a special treatment.
He sent his cultural editor Flemming Rose, who commissioned the cartoons, on an "indefinite leave" only one day after he told CNN he would consider publishing Holocaust cartoons.
Britain's the Guardian also revealed recently that Jyllands-Posten refused three years ago to publish cartoon of Jesus Christ on the ground it was "offensive" to its readers.
