Tread carefully while defining extremism: UK ministers told

A UK parliamentary committee on Friday said there was currently no useable legal definition of ‘extremism’ and warned that ministers should “tread carefully” when they try to define extremism as it risked undermining relations with some communities.

The government should reconsider its strategy on fighting extremism because it risks making the situation worse, the Joint Committee on Human Rights said.

The committee, in a report, urged ministers to “tread carefully” when trying to define extremism as it risked undermining relations with some communities. “It is far from clear that there is an accepted definition of what constitutes extremism, let alone what legal powers there should be, if any, to combat it. It does not appear that the government so far has been successful in arriving at one,” the report said. Currently the government defines extremism as “the vocal or active opposition to our fundamental values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs”.

Committee chair Harriet Harman told BBC, “The difficulty with that is —again it’s the definition —for example, I don’t respect religions that regard women as subservient, I don’t tolerate the views or beliefs of people who think that homosexuality is a sin, but I’m clearly not an extremist on the path to violence.”