In an interview with Britain's Daily Telegraph, EU Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini said the charter would encourage the media to show "prudence" when covering religion.
An Afghan protester shouts slogans as he marches through the streets of Kabul during a demonstration in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2006.
"The press will give the Muslim world the message: We are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression," he told the newspaper. "We can and we are ready to self-regulate that right."
His proposed voluntary code would urge the media to respect all religious sensibilities but would not offer privileged status to any one faith.
The cartoons, which first appeared in a Danish newspaper last September before being reprinted across Europe, sparked a wave of protests around the world. Newspapers which have published them say they are exercising their right to freedom of speech, while critics say the cartoons are deliberately offensive. Depicting the Prophet Mohammad is prohibited by Islam. Frattini, a former Italian foreign minister, said millions of Muslims in Europe felt "humiliated" by the cartoons.
The EU's foreign policy chief Javier Solana is to travel to Arab and Muslim countries in an attempt to calm the anger caused by the cartoons.
The code would be drawn up by the European Commission, the EU executive body, and European media outlets, he said. It would not have legal status.
Extra! Extra! Read all about it! That street corner cry of yesteryear is resonating at some European publications that have enjoyed a boom in sales and Web traffic after printing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that have stoked outrage across the Islamic world.
Denmark's biggest-circulation broadsheet, Jyllands-Posten, triggered the controversy in September by publishing 12 cartoons of the prophet, including one showing his turban as a bomb. Its weekday circulation of about 154,000 hasn't moved much.
But for newspapers in France and Norway that reprinted the drawings with much international ado, the caricatures have become a profile boost and tonic for lackluster sales.
If there's a lesson, it's an old one: Controversy sells.
Mohamed Bechari, a vice president at the French Council of the Muslim Faith, France's largest Islamic organization, said he thinks French readers are buying up the newspapers out of "curiosity" — not anti-Arab or anti-Muslim feeling.
"Here's some advice to those newspapers today facing ruin, bankruptcy or collapse: All you need do is insult Muslims and Islam, and sales will get hot as blazes," he told The Associated Press at a Paris conference Thursday on promoting dialogue between the West and the Muslim world, convened in response to the furor over the drawings.
Demonstrators in Syria, Lebanon and Iran have attacked Western embassies. Protests and boycotts of Danish goods erupted in numerous Arab and Islamic countries. Three days of riots across Afghanistan left 11 people dead.
European papers benefit in cartoon uproar
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