France orders crackdown on hate speech

France has ordered prosecutors around the country to crack down on hate speech, anti-Semitism and glorifying terrorism as it announced that 54 people had been arrested for those offences since the Paris terror attacks.

The order came as Charlie Hebdo’s defiant new issue sold out before dawn around Paris, with scuffles at kiosks over dwindling copies of the satirical newspaper depicting the Prophet Mohammed.

Like many European countries, France has strong laws against hate speech and especially anti-Semitism in the wake of the Holocaust.