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Europe Continues Work on Cybercrime Treaty

Posted by michael on from the one-treaty-to-bind-them-all dept.

Tosta Dojen writes: "I haven't seen this posted yet, but the Council of Europe is proposing a ban on Internet 'Hate Speech'. Fortunately it looks like some intelligent comments are already being made." This is a continuation of the Cybercrime treaty, which we've mentioned before. Wired had a story about this a few days ago.

3 of 325 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This is not right by leviramsey · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Personally, I don't think someone should be allowed to share his opinion when this opinion is that killing people because of some arbitrary criteria is the way to go. Especially scince they tend to act after their opinion.

    I dispute that contention. While (p(x) = "x commits hate crimes") implies (q(x) = "x is racist/whatever"), the converse does not hold. Judging by the amount of racist material that gets posted here on Slashdot and Usenet, especially if you browse at -1, I would expect there to be a lot more racist crime in this world than there is.

  2. Perhaps by fluxrad · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Perhaps this whole argument is best summed up by one of my favorite quotes (from none other than George Orwell):

    "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

    --
    "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
  3. Why Europeans ban 'hate speech' by san · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Although almost all of Western Europe has now been a democracy for at least 60 years, with constitutional provisions for the freedom of speech in all democracies (except the UK where the European Treaty on Human Rights serves this purpose), there are strict laws against 'inciting race hatred', which limit free speech w.r.t. open racism etc.

    Although the European countries and their laws and practices are quite diverse, there seem to be two main arguments which have lead to the introduction of these laws. The first is practical: Europeans have experience with regimes based on bringing this kind of speech in practice; World War II is still very much a defining moment in the collective history of Europeans. Most democracies were either founded just after the war, or have been re-established with new constitutions after 1945. In this way, anti-nazism and anti-fascism has been one of the primary foundations by which the democratic ideals were established and affirmed. The idea was: never again should a democracy change into a racist totalitarian state, and it's worthwhile to give up that bit of freedom to prevent this from happening again.

    The other argument is more philosophical: there seems to be a difference in the basis for the fundamental freedoms and rights between the US and Europe. In the US, these freedoms and rights are seen as 'god-given' (or 'self-evident'), and are seen primarily as a way to protect the citizen against the state. In Europe, the basis for the democratic system with its freedoms is the notion of the right to live in 'human dignity'. This implies that the citizen should not just be protected from the state, but also from people and corporations who try to infringe on 'human dignity'. In this sense, 'inciting race hatred' is seen as more threatening to minorities' right to dignity than the person uttering those 'threats' (remember that Europe has witnessed 'incitement' changing to actual genocide).

    You may or may not agree with these laws, but in Europe there seems to be a broad majority in favor of these laws, mainly because of WWII.

    I hope my point is still clear in this long rant :-)

    Sander