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Comment by Mvandenbergh | Hacker News Reader

There are no "EU citizens" only citizens of EU member countries. None of those countries have freedom of speech as expansive as Americans but Americans in practice also don't have absolute freedom of speech.

1) Certain speech such as "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" has long been considered illegal.

2) The US has much more expansive laws about "conspiracy to..." which make it illegal to have certain conversations.

Oh, those don't count? Not real speech. Sure, why not.

3) Most people will experience very real economic consequences for a very wide range of speech. We're not all yeoman farmers entirely independent of paid employment.

That presumably doesn't count because only governments can restrict liberties? Well, have it your way but I would regard losing my job due to speech as a pretty severe restriction on my liberty.

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> 1) Certain speech such as "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" has long been considered illegal.

This was a serious curtailment to free speech. "shouting fire in a crowded theater" was a euphemism for telling people to dodge the draft during WWI, making this restriction an overt curtailment of free political speech. Thankfully though, this was overturned several decades ago. The current standard is that you can't "incite imminent lawless action", so for instance it's not legal to say "Hey everybody, let's lynch Mvandenbergh from that tree right now!" But to your point, this is still a restriction on free speech, it's not an absolute right in America. You are correct on that point.

EU citizenship was established by the Treaty on European Union [1] in 1992. While EU citizenship is different and additional to national citizenship, it does exist in law.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/resource.html?uri=cellar:2bf140bf-...

EU citizenship can be removed, by force, on mass, and has been done for millions of people.

I know, I'm one of them. Nonetheless, it still exists.

> Revoking someone’s citizenship is hugely controversial. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights enshrines having a nationality as a right, forbidding countries to arbitrarily deprive someone of it.

It seems to me that if I were an EU citizen, the EU would be the ones who had to remove my citizenship, and that would be a very controversial step. I don't recall long winded speeches in the UN denouncing the EU for forcefully removing the citizenship of millions of people, which leads me to think that it's not a "real" citizenship.

The UDHR, Article 15, says that everybody has a right to have nationality and can't arbitrarily be deprived of nationality. The EU is not a nation and nobody has an "EU nationality", so depriving somebody of their EU citizenship doesn't violate Article 15. People in the UK retained their nationalities.

"German citizen" == "Germany nationality"

"Nigeria citizen" == "Nigerian nationality"

"EU citizen" != "EU nationality"

Sounds like you figured it out. Germany and Nigeria are nations, the EU is not. Appropriately, Germany and Nigeria are represented in the United Nations, while the EU is not.

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