Comment by Asdfbla
9 years ago
Many European countries (like Germany etc.) have operated with free speech restrictions since the end of WW2 and the slippery slope that is always brought up never materialized.
Slippery slope arguments are only valid if you believe that your jurisdiction doesn't have proper rule of law. Otherwise experience, at least in European countries, showed that courts are very well capable of recognizing the importance of free speech even for tasteless and hateful speech.
> slippery slope that is always brought up never materialized
The targets of the 234,341 criminal insult investigations conducted by German police last year[1] might argue otherwise. A few thousand of those were elementary school kids. Sixteen were preschoolers.
> courts are very well capable of recognizing the importance of free speech even for tasteless and hateful speech
Bless your heart. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that your personal experience is untainted by exposure to actual courts. Prosecutors in the United States are not exactly known for rigorous exercise of discretion, and defending yourself in court can be ruinously expensive even if you prevail.
---
[1] https://www.bka.de/DE/AktuelleInformationen/StatistikenLageb...
Investigations are not convictions.
...and your point is?
You do not need to convict or even formally charge someone in order to have chilling effect on speech; when the police investigate you for a crime, and the mere possibility of being charged and convicted hangs over your head, you will think twice about what you say.
And while I know little about German jurisprudence, I do know that prosecutors in this country do not need to attain a conviction in order to destroy someone's life. Once a prosecutor claims you are guilty, plenty of people will believe it no matter the outcome, and that's on top of depleting your life savings on legal representation. I urge everyone to keep this in mind when contemplating how European-style hate speech laws (or any proposed laws) would play out in the United States.
The stats I linked above suggest a clearance rate of 89% for criminal insult investigations. While that number dwarfs the 56% average clearance rate for criminal investigations across Germany, it is unclear to me whether those figures describe how many investigations led to convictions, indictments, a suspect being formally charged, or merely the positive identification of a suspect. I believe the term generally refers to the proportion of investigations that lead to a suspect being formally charged, but I wasn't certain, so I left that figure out.
Feel free to dig deeper.
3 replies →
> the slippery slope that is always brought up never materialized.
Very true. Well, except maybe for that one time when Germany became an open-air rape camp under the noses of police who did nothing for fear of being accused of racism. That kind of sucked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_Eve_sexual_assaul...
And, oh yeah, there was that time they threw a lawyer in jail for defending a Holocaust denier.
http://www.dw.com/en/german-neo-nazi-lawyer-sentenced-for-de...
But otherwise, sure, unqualified success. Great example.
> And, oh yeah, there was that time they threw a lawyer in jail for defending a Holocaust denier.
That's not an honest reading of the article you linked. From the article, "[the lawyer] also signed a motion during Zündel's trial with "Heil Hitler" and shouted that the lay judges deserved the death penalty for "offering succour to the enemy" -- leading the court to dismiss her." She was a neo-Nazi herself.
How about this one then? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germar_Rudolf
In other words, she didn't defend him the way you feel that she should have.
We'll just make a list of all the arguments that are okay to advance in court, so then lawyers know which ones are forbidden.
That seems like a good concept with no far-reaching implications.
8 replies →
I have nothing to say really about your first point where you do nothing but speculate about police motives, but the second one doesn't prove anything either.
The second case is not a slippery slope because it does precisely what's codified in German law, nothing more and nothing less. The lawyer herself denied the holocaust and that's punishable in Germany. So the law was correctly applied. That has absolutely nothing to do with the slippery slope discussion.
> you do nothing but speculate about police motives
80 cops "failed to notice" over 1000 violent crimes taking place in a space about the size of a football field, over the course of several hours.
My "speculation" is, by far, the very kindest interpretation.
> So the law was correctly applied.
Let's hope so. Defending her is a crime so we'll never really know.
2 replies →
>Very true. Well, except maybe for that one time when Germany became an open-air rape camp under the noses of police who did nothing for fear of being accused of racism.
What an awful example and has nothing, what so ever to do with the laws against being a Nazi. Do you honestly believe the US has never avoided reporting something for fear of being labeled? Really?
The other example you gave was covered by others in the thread. Spoiler: it's a lie.
> nothing, what so ever to do with the laws against being a Nazi
You are very poorly informed. The laws against "being a Nazi" are generic "no bad speech" laws. Nazism is just their most well-known application. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksverhetzung
> Spoiler: it's a lie.
A lawyer went to prison, for statements she made, in court, in defense of her client. That's not supposed to happen. It's not a feature.
Germany is a joke. The fact that it's even considered a country and not a US territory is beyond me.
If you have a US military base in your country you are objectively not a sovereign nation.