On January 24, the Copenhagen Public Prosecutor’s Office (Denmark) announced the indictment of two individuals for ‘inappropriate treatment of a religious text’ after they desecrated the Quran during a festival in June 2024. The incident, filmed and broadcast live on Facebook, took place in public and was widely followed.

This indictment comes more than a year after the adoption of a Danish law prohibiting the burning of the Quran, which came into effect in December 2023, following multiple acts of desecration that caused tensions with several Muslim countries.

The law prohibits, among other things, burning, defiling, or destroying religious texts in public, with penalties of up to two years in prison. According to the newspaper Politiken, the police are currently investigating eight potential violations of this law.