Hacker News Reader

Comment by w1nst0nsm1th | Hacker News Reader

I think we’re still a long way before we reach the excess of Russia regarding free speech et subordination of democratic values.

View on HN

Spain banned speech critical of the government several years ago, and several people have been jailed already. At least one person has been jailed over a tweet.

Europe isn’t one big whole, parts of it are already obviously worse than others.

Please, provide a source.

When Pedro Sánchez (current Spanish Prime Minister) PhD thesis was discovered to be an alleged forgery or when allegedly used an official plane for personal matters there was plenty of content criticizing h directly.

> Spain banned speech critical of the government

Could you please provide some reference? I seriously doubt that what you said is correct.

Spain has passed a law banning the “glorification of terrorism” or “humiliating victims of terrorism”. While this is not 'speech critical of the government' the law is vaguely worded and has been broadly interpreted. More detail in this report from Amnesty International:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/Spain-Counter...

I don't know why you're being downvoted. While the GP comment is total BS, what you wrote is simply the facts.

There's nobody in jail for writing anything.

The report is based on facts, but it goes overboard with the conclusions.

Edit: the BS comment is by oarsinsync, so it should be GGP, sorry if that led to confusionl.

Apologies, I appear to have overstated things for sure.

That said, satire against the police force lands you in court:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/07/satirical-arti...

And tweeting can get you a suspended sentence (which got overturned on appeal, but didn't prevent the original conviction):

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/01/spanish-studen...

I did overstate things, but "total BS" doesn't seem fair either.

First of all, I'm opposed to that law. If it was up to me, it would be annihilated from existence.

Please understand that joining a few imprecisions, innocuous in isolation, the result is totally incorrect.

'Incorrect' would have been better than 'BS' indeed, sorry. The reason for verbal escalation is we have to see this kind of "imprecision" very often and it's not funny anymore.

Oh, one more thing. Satire is a different thing than outright insult. Putting the insult in a cartoon makes no difference. The Guardian makes a good job mentioning the context, maybe because in the UK there're a libel laws.

Also in the other article correctly mention that the "rapper" was accused of death threats and asking terrorists to attack people. The guy is at large, thanks to certain terrorists haven country that happens to host EU institutions.

I live in Spain. The king is a hamster and the government in Madrid smells of elderberries.

EU is certainly not yet where Russia is. But it's walking the same road, and stepping on the same rakes on the way. How long does it take depends on how complacent EU citizens would be when they freedoms are taken away. So far the answer seems to be "quite so", but maybe when people start being fined and jailed and sites like Internet Archive start being blocked some of them would wake up?

How long? It's always quicker than you think once you're sliding down the slope.

Russia is blazing the way in demonstrating specifically how purportedly anti-extremist censorship laws can be applied in practice, though. To give one example, it has a law against "actions that are directed at fomenting hatred or enmity against, or humiliating the dignity of, a person or a group of people, on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, language, origin, religion, or membership in some social group". Civil infraction the first time around, and you can go to prison for several years for a repeat offence.

Doesn't sound so bad, does it? Well, turns out that police can be a social group. So can government employees. And members of parliament. Of course, back when they passed that law, some civil libertarians did point out the vagueness. But it went exactly as it usually does in any Western country - the politicians were pinky swearing that this is all about Nazis and radical Islamists and other nasty people like that who deserve it, and obviously it wouldn't be used for anything inappropriate; but, you see, if it's too narrow, then the bad guys can find ways around it, so it has to allow for some flexibility.

For most Westerners, the immediate reaction to this is, "it can never happen here" - not the laws, since many countries have similar, but the part where they get misused. We'd never tolerate it, the argument goes. But we are tolerating it. France also has exemplary hate speech laws - and under them, wearing a t-shirt that advocates a boycott of Israel is a hate crime, a felony even, and people are actually getting arrested, charged and convicted under it. The law in question is 15 years old now, and it's far from the only one like that in Europe - just the most abused one so far.

https://theintercept.com/2017/08/29/in-europe-hate-speech-la...

The European Court of Human Rights upheld a conviction in 2018 for "disparagement of religious precepts" because a woman in Austria said that Muhammad was a paedophile (which is correct, since according to the Quran, Muhammad had sex with a 9 year old whom he had married when she was 6):

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr...

Does homophobic count as free speech?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com