“Dirty campaigns” and offensive language are, of course, not desirable, but it might be problematic to prohibit them by penal law. While in a number of CoE member states insult and/or defamation remain criminal offences, punishable with fines and/or imprisonment (e.g. Albania, Austria, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Russian Federation, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, and particularly broad, in Turkey), the UN Human Rights Committee states that defamation laws must be crafted with care to ensure that they do not serve to stifle freedom of expression. Care should be taken, inter alia, to avoid excessively punitive measures and penalties. Moreover: “States parties should consider the decriminalization of defamation and, in any case, the application of the criminal law should only be countenanced in the most serious of cases and imprisonment is never an appropriate penalty” (CCPR/C/GC/34, para 47).