An art exhibition by Cypriot artist George Gavriel was cancelled last month following intense political and social reactions after its inauguration. Officials from the country’s conservative party DISY dismissed the paintings as obscenity and rejected freedom of expression as a justification. Far-right ELAM went further by calling for legal action, framing the works as a direct attack on faith and societal values. These allegations were rapidly amplified in public discourse, culminating in death threats against the gallery owner and a violent attack on Gavriel’s private residence involving the detonation of an explosive device outside his home.

The episode raises a fundamental question under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR): can the suppression of artistic expression through political instrumentalization and institutional withdrawal amount to an interference with freedom of expression in the absence of a formal ban? Read against the Court’s jurisprudence, the Gavriel episode illustrates a broader structural failure rather than an isolated anomaly. The Court’s repeated affirmation that freedom of expression protects ideas that “offend, shock or disturb” sits uneasily with its readiness to tolerate suppression where offence is framed in moral or religious terms. In this sense, Gavriel’s case does not merely test the limits of Article 10; it exposes the extent to which the Convention framework, as currently interpreted, is ill-equipped to protect artistic freedom against contemporary forms of political pressure, moral panic and intimidation.

The political interference

A particularly troubling dimension of the Cyprus controversy concerns the political instrumentalization of Gavriel’s work by public officials. The circulation of a collage that assembled different and contextually unrelated artworks played a significant role in shaping the events. This collage was disseminated by a member of parliament (MP) of DISY. By extracting individual works from their artistic and curatorial context and recombining them into a single collage, the artistic message was reframed in a manner that intensified outrage and moral condemnation. It must be noted that, while politicians are, of course, entitled to criticise art, selective or misleading representation that frames artistic expression as socially dangerous may foreseeably intensify public animosity and contribute to a climate of intimidation. This is particularly significant where, as in the present case, hostility escalated into threats and physical violence against the artist. As such, from an Article 10 perspective, the dissemination of the collage by a DISY MP cannot be considered normatively neutral. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR/Court) has emphasised that politicians must take care when expressing themselves in public to avoid promoting feelings of intolerance (see Féret v. Belgium, para. 75).

Artistic expression under Article 10 ECHR

Article 10 of the ECHR provides that everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority. Article 10 limits free speech on the grounds of, inter alia, public order, public morals and for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, insofar as these restrictions are necessary in a democratic society. The Court has made clear that artistic expression is not excluded from Article 10 protection precisely because the Convention text does not distinguish between expressive forms (see Müller and Others v. Switzerland, para. X).

In Jelševar and Others v. Slovenia (2014), the Court adopted a more value-oriented articulation of artistic freedom, characterising it as a “value in itself” that attracts a high level of protection under the Convention. This protection is not justified solely by reference to aesthetic autonomy, but by the role of artistic expression in facilitating participation in the public exchange of cultural, political and social ideas. In Lindon, Otchakovsky-Laurens and July v. France (2007), the Court held that

“artistic expression […] falls within the scope of Article 10 in that it affords the opportunity to take part in the public exchange of cultural, political and social information and ideas of all kinds.”

In addition, the ECtHR has repeatedly noted that the freedom of expression extends to ideas

“that offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population. Such are the demands of that pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness without which there is no democratic society” (see Handyside v. UK, para. 49).

However, States may restrict artistic freedom where this is considered necessary to protect religious pluralism as secured under Article 9 of the Convention on the right to freedom of religion. The Court has granted States a wide margin of appreciation in this ambit, given that “it is not possible to discern throughout Europe a uniform conception of the significance of religion in society” (see Otto-Preminger-Institut v. Austria, para. 50).

Müller and Others v. Switzerland (1988), concerned the public exhibition of large-scale paintings depicting explicit sexual acts, including homosexuality, group sex, and bestiality, displayed without age restrictions in a gallery open to the general public. Swiss authorities seized the paintings and imposed criminal fines on the artists for obscenity. In finding no violation of Article 10, the Court relied heavily on the protection of public morals. Wingrove v The United Kingdom (1994) involved the banning of a film that portrayed, amongst others, a female figure positioned on the body of the crucified Christ in an overtly sexualised way. The Court accepted the position of national authorities that the film depicted Christ in a “contemptuous, reviling, insulting, scurrilous or ludicrous tone, style and spirit” on the grounds that this could “outrage those who have an understanding of sympathy towards and support for a religion’s story and ethic.”

Otto-Preminger-Institut v. Austria (1994) involved the seizure of a film that included, amongst others, the depiction of the Christian God as a senile man, Jesus Christ as a “mummy’s boy” of low intelligence and the Virgin Mary as an immoral woman. They all worked with the Devil to punish mankind through the spread of syphilis. Here, the Court allowed for the imposition of national restrictions on speech, including criminal fines, on the grounds that it sought “to protect the right of citizens not to be insulted in their religious feelings by the public expression of views of other persons.”

In Vereinigung Bildender Künstler v. Austria (2007), the applicant (an association of artists) held an exhibition which included the satirical painting “Apocalypse” which featured members of the Austrian Freedom Party as well as Mother Teresa and an Austrian cardinal, engaging in graphic sexual acts. One of the politicians who appeared in the painting filed a lawsuit against the association that held the exhibition. The applicant was fined and banned from displaying this painting. The ECtHR found a violation of Article 10 and emphasized that

“satire is a form of artistic expression and social commentary and, by its inherent features of exaggeration and distortion of reality, naturally aims to provoke and agitate. Accordingly, any interference with an artist’s right to such expression must be examined with particular care” (para. 33).

Inconsistencies and hierarchies in religious expression

Read comparatively, a serious problem emerges in the Court’s approach. In Müller and Others, Wingrove and Otto-Preminger-Institut, the impugned expression was directed at religious divinities or core sacred figures, allowing the Court to frame the interference as protecting believers from serious offence to their religious feelings. By contrast, Vereinigung Bildender Künstler concerned satirical depictions not of divinity or religious doctrine, but of religious personalities, presented alongside political actors in a deliberately provocative artistic context. The Court’s finding of a violation in the latter case suggests the existence of an implicit threshold between attacks on divinity and irreverent portrayals of religious figures. Yet this distinction is left entirely unarticulated in the Court’s reasoning and is doctrinally unstable.

From the perspective of Article 10, it is far from clear why satire directed at religious personalities should attract greater protection than equally provocative artistic engagement with religious divinities, particularly in a Convention system committed to pluralism and tolerance. The dissenting opinion in Müller and Others, with its invocation of the historical prosecutions of Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal, forcefully reminds us that offence grounded in prevailing moral or religious sensibilities is an unreliable basis for limiting expression. Elevating such sensibilities into legal thresholds risks entrenching de facto blasphemy protections under the guise of protecting religious feelings. As such, the Court may lower the bar for interference and transform Article 10(2) into the norm rather than the exception. In this light, Vereinigung Bildender Künstler does not resolve the Court’s inconsistency but, instead, exposes the fragility of its conceptual boundaries, reinforcing the broader concern that freedom of expression remains most vulnerable precisely where it confronts religious and moral orthodoxies.

Moreover, as with hate speech jurisprudence, it is difficult to ignore a structural inconsistency in the Court’s approach to cases involving alleged religious offence. While the Court routinely reiterates the foundational principle that freedom of expression protects ideas that “offend, shock or disturb,” this commitment appears increasingly fragile when confronted with expression deemed morally troubling or religiously offensive. In cases concerning artistic expression, the Court has been quick to defer to national authorities, invoking public morals, religious feelings, and social cohesion to justify far-reaching interferences that often amount to outright suppression. This tendency mirrors, albeit in a different doctrinal register, the Court’s approach to hate speech, where the threshold for exclusion from Article 10 protection is frequently lowered and the language of pluralism gives way to a readiness to curtail expression in the name of protecting others (see, e.g Féret v. Belgium (2009), Vejdeland v. Sweden (2012), Sanchez v. France (2023, Lilliendahl v. Iceland (2020)).

Conclusion

The cancellation of Gavriel’s exhibition illustrates, with clarity, how artistic expression may be curtailed without recourse to formal censorship. Institutional withdrawal, political amplification and public intimidation combined to ensure that the artworks never reached the public, producing a chilling effect which is fundamentally incompatible with the spirit and purpose of Article 10 ECHR. This episode exposes the dangers of normalising cancellation as a mechanism for managing controversy. When public institutions retreat in response to political outrage, and when elected officials actively participate in the moral framing and amplification of contested artworks, artistic freedom is hollowed out from within. What emerges is not pluralism, but a climate in which offence is weaponised, and expression is rendered contingent on its conformity with dominant moral or religious sensibilities.

At its core, the Gavriel episode does not turn on questions of faith or artistic taste. As the public debate itself reveals, the issue is not whether the artworks are agreeable, whether they conform to particular notions of art, or whether they align with individual belief systems. What is at stake, instead, is to recognise freedom of expression as a foundational value that cannot be made contingent on approval, comfort or consensus.