Australia

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Blasphemy law has been dying a long, uneven death for two centuries, and the death is not the same everywhere. Denmark repealed its Penal Code Section 140 in June 2017 after a prosecution over a Quran-burning video finally forced parliament's hand, ending a provision on the books for 334 years. France abolished its national offense back in 1881, though the 1905 law separating church and state stopped at the old imperial border, and Alsace-Moselle, annexed by Germany at the time, kept a version inherited from the German Criminal Code of 1871 that the rest of France never had to repeal because it was never reunified under the 1905 law at all.

Australia shows how slowly a common law offense can die when nobody forces the question. Blasphemous libel came into the colonies as inherited English common law, and each jurisdiction has handled it differently since: Queensland and Western Australia dropped it when they wrote their own criminal codes, the Australian Capital Territory repealed it by name in 1996, and Tasmania, which had gone the unusual route of converting the common law offense into a statute, section 119 of its Criminal Code Act 1924, repealed that section only in October 2024, after a Rationalist Society of Australia campaign. New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and the Northern Territory have never formally abolished the common law version, though nobody has been prosecuted under it since 1871. Hong Kong offers a stranger case of the same inertia: secondary legal sources describe it as still carrying the same inherited English common law offense, since Article 8 of the Basic Law preserved pre-1997 common law wholesale and England itself did not abolish blasphemous libel until 2008, after the handover. Whether any Hong Kong court or the Legislative Council has ever actually confirmed, narrowed or scrapped that inheritance could not be established in this pass, and stands as an open question on this atlas rather than a settled fact.

Where the offense has not simply lapsed from disuse, states have tended to replace it rather than repeal it outright. Azerbaijan has no statute called blasphemy, but Criminal Code Article 283.1 criminalizes incitement of religious hatred and the humiliation of dignity on religious grounds, with a harsher version, Article 283.1-1, for acts rooted in religious enmity or radicalism, carrying three to five years imprisonment, a general hate-speech law doing a blasphemy law's work under a different name. Taiwan kept the old form rather than replacing it: Article 246 of its Criminal Code, under a chapter still titled Offenses Against Religion, Graves and Corpses, punishes publicly insulting a shrine, temple, church or grave with up to six months imprisonment or a small fine, a genuinely live but very low-stakes survival.

The starkest contrast in this survey is Vatican City, where the offense has not retreated at all. Canon 1368 of the Code of Canon Law, retained unchanged when Pope Francis revised the whole of Book VI by the apostolic constitution Pascite gregem Dei in 2021, still punishes anyone who utters blasphemy at a public event, in a published writing, or through the means of social communication. Vatican City is the one jurisdiction in this survey where a blasphemy law is not a relic being argued over. It is current law, inside the one state built entirely around the faith it protects.

Australia is religiously diverse and increasingly unaffiliated, with the most recent census recording Christians at just under half the population, split between Catholic and various Protestant denominations, religiously unaffiliated Australians now forming the largest single category at close to 40 percent, and Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and Sikh communities each in the low single digits, figures broadly reflected in Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020.

Aboriginal Australian religious traditions, encompassing hundreds of distinct language groups and their own cosmologies centered on the Dreaming, an ongoing sacred order linking ancestral creator beings, land and law, represent one of the world's oldest continuous religious traditions, with sites such as Uluru holding deep and specific ceremonial significance to the Anangu traditional owners.

British colonization from 1788 brought Anglican establishment initially, though Australia never developed a formally established national church, and Catholic Irish convict and later free immigration built a substantial Catholic population that historically experienced sectarian tension with the Protestant majority well into the twentieth century. Postwar immigration diversified Australia's religious landscape considerably, adding significant Orthodox Christian, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu communities from Southern Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Uluru, a massive sandstone monolith in central Australia sacred to the Anangu people as a site embodying multiple Dreaming narratives and ceremonial obligations, was formally returned to Anangu traditional ownership in 1985 under a lease-back arrangement with the Australian government, though the site remained open to recreational tourist climbing, a practice many Anangu found deeply disrespectful to its sacred status, until a long-sought permanent climbing ban finally took effect in October 2019 following sustained Anangu advocacy.

Australia's 1967 referendum, which amended the constitution to count Aboriginal people in the census and allow federal legislation for their welfare, and the 1992 Mabo High Court decision, which overturned the legal fiction that the land had been unoccupied before European settlement, both reshaped the legal and religious recognition of Aboriginal connection to land, since Dreaming-based spiritual relationships to country are central to subsequent native title claims.

Australia's 2023 referendum on constitutionally enshrining an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, which would have given Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples a formal advisory body, failed at the national vote, a result many Indigenous leaders and religious commentators described as a setback for reconciliation efforts tied closely to recognition of Aboriginal spiritual and cultural authority over traditional lands.