As the 2005 Danish caricatures of Prophet Mohammed continue to ricochet from newsrooms to religious communities to government offices and court rooms around the world, the right to offend, disturb and shock audiences has led many to question how far freedom of expression and freedom of the press can extend. During the press freedom roundtable at the 61st World Newspaper Congress in Göteborg, Sweden, publishers, journalists, a cartoonist and human rights experts defended the right to offend audiences but also addressed its implications. The debate was moderated by Miklos Haraszti, OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media.

At the opening of the roundtable publisher and editor Philippe Val of the satirical French weekly Charlie Hebdo, said he re-published the contentious Danish caricatures of Prophet Mohammed as a statement of freedom of expression, "to show that it was possible to do so" and move on.

"If we, in a democratic country, no longer have the right to laugh at those who want to terrorize us, there’s a real problem," said Val. Following the abrupt dismissal of the managing editor of the daily France-Soir for being the first editor in France to publish the cartoons, Val, along with the managing editor of L’Express, saw the urgency of exposing the problem within a democratic context. "It’s satire-a satire on terror," he said, that has cross-societal ramifications and "has nothing to do with Islam."

Editor in chief and managing director Ulf Johansson of the Swedish regional newspaper Nerikes Allehanda published a cartoon of the Prophet as a dog for similar reasons. "We demanded that it must be possible to ridicule religion," he said, while also stressing that there needs to be space for all religions to be practiced. "[In Sweden] we defend [freedom of religion] as hard as freedom of speech," Johansson said.

Even with leaving editorial space for a variety of viewpoints which may include religious epithets or lampooning, Johansson said, "I surely don’t mean that I would like to publish pictures of, for example Mohammed, easily in my newspaper...I must think about the Muslim people living in my hometown that were affected."

Likewise, Val believes "In a democracy, a political force, one that claims the right to define the limits of law, must expose itself to criticism and satire like anyone else. It is no longer a religion then, it is an ideology. We have the right to criticize Islam when it masquerades as a [political] ideology."

For that reason Val said the cartoons were not racist. Similarly, general counsel Dinah PoKempner of Human Rights Watch said the cartoons were particularly interesting insofar as they shook religious sentiment and not specific Muslim people, placing them at the other end of the spectrum from, for example, hate speech propagated during the Rwanda genocide by the radio station Mille Collines. Rather, the cartoons forced open the debate on "Islam’s compatibility with secularism and atheism," as according to Val on what happened in France.