Excerpt:
All attempts to curb free speech are "an attack on human nature", British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie said Tuesday at the start of the world's biggest book fair in Frankfurt.
"Limiting freedom of expression is not just censorship, it is also an assault on human nature," Rushdie told a news conference.
"Expression of speech is fundamental to all human beings. We are language animals, we are story-telling animals," he said, insisting that free speech was a universal principle.