The World Briefly

March 14, 2023

The Right To Insult

Canada

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A Canadian court ruled that giving the middle finger is not a crime and is protected under the country’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, NPR reported.

The legality of a raised middle finger – also known in polite terms as “flipping the bird” – was questioned in a case between two Montreal neighbors who had a history of heated exchanges.

The case began when neighbors Michael Naccache and Neall Epstein traded insults and gestures during an altercation in May 2021. Naccache accused Epstein of raising the middle finger and doing a throat-slitting motion, saying that the latter gesture prompted him to call the police out of fear for his life.

Authorities later arrested Epstein on charges of criminal harassment and uttering death threats, according to the Washington Post.

But the Court of Quebec recently dismissed the charges, with the judge criticizing the allegations as “petty neighborhood trivialities.”

“It is not a crime to give someone the finger,” Judge Dennis Galiatsatos wrote in the Feb. 24 ruling. “Flipping the proverbial bird is a God-given, Charter enshrined right that belongs to every red-blooded Canadian.”

Even so, the legal debate over flipping the bird has gotten mixed results in the United States.

In 2019, a US Court of Appeals judge found that a raised middle finger was a form of free speech. But the following year a North Carolina court decided in favor of a state trooper who had charged a driver with flipping the bird at him.

Last month, a Delaware man sued police after he received a citation for raising the middle finger at officials.

This story originally appeared in the March 14, 2023 newsletter, Coming Due.