Frederick Toben is an awful man, who denies the plain fact that the Nazis killed six million Jews and between nine and eleven million Jews, Slavs, Romany, homosexuals, Soviets (civilians and POWs), Poles, disabled, and so on.
But what he thinks is not a crime, either in Australia, where he lives, or in the United Kingdom, where he was arrested on a German warrant for breaking German laws. And it was right that he was released by the British courts. If people can be arrested and charged for breaking laws online in jurisdictions where they do not reside, no matter how awful their views are, then people can be arrested for breaking laws we do not think are right, such as, for example, Sharia or Hassidic laws. This would undercut the whole notion of international law. I am so glad that the UK system showed some legal sense here, although I wish Toben would STFU.
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I'm generally pro-Europe, but these European arrest warrants are going to cause no end of trouble.
At least we Europeans don't make the kind of extraterritorial claims that the Americans do.
Well, not lately. I think France and the use of the Pacific for nuclear testing, and their actions in New Zealand, might be the latest (google Rainbow Warrior), although largescale extraterritorial claims seemed to cease around 1950 or so. Let's see, when did the Dutch leave Indonesia, and the French leave Algeria? Umm, there's the British against the insurgency in Malaya, as it was then, and the French in Indochine. The British left India in 48, so yes, I think you lot stopped around 1950. Portugal stopped, when, in 1999 with the handback of Macau, and the independence (badly handled and so shortlived until a few years back) of East Timor in the early 1970s.
And I think France still has claims on various islands in the Caribbean, Polynesia, Indian Ocean, and of course French Guyana.
I wouldn't be too self satisfied, if I were European. Nor am I as an Australian: Australia stopped later, when we relinquished New Guinea, in 1975. Australia is, for all intents, a European power.
Denying the holocaust is one of the most despicable verbal actions imaginable and Toben sounds like a particularly nasty exemplar of a "revisionist historian" -- but it is a verbal action and nobody should be sent to prison for verbalizing their thoughts. As historian Deborah Lipstadt has put it (speaking about holocaust denier David Irving's arrest in Austria in 2005): "I am not happy when censorship wins, and I don't believe in winning battles via censorship... The way of fighting Holocaust deniers is with history and with truth." The same is true here: the point is not that German laws prohibitig holocaust denial should not be enforced in Britain, the point is that these German laws should not exist in the first place.
No prosecution without equal representation.
The French left Algeria in 1962. If you leave out Ethiopia (arguably never colonized, depending on one's view of the short-lived Axis invasion in WWII) and Liberia, I believe the earliest year an African nation became independent of a European colonial power was 1951, when Libya became independent of Italy. Most of the independence declarations happened about 1960. A few European colonial powers hung on into the late 1970s. (Examples: France pulled out of Djibouti in 1977, Britain pulled out of Zimbabwe in 1980.)
You seem to have misunderstood my comment. It wasn't about colonialism.
The USA tries to enforce its laws in other countries even when people do things that are perfectly legal in that country. For example, European companies doing business in Cuba get into all kinds of trouble.
And then there are the "extraordinary rendition" cases, like Maher Arar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maher_Arar.
I have a problem with calling colonialism extra territorial (or the mindset of trying to keep what you got even if it's wrong).
That said the Dutch managed to hold on to East Guinea until 1962. And still have claims on several island in the Caribbean area (Aruba and the Dutch Antilles).
Gregory Earl wrote:
In principle I'm against all forms of censorship, but one does have to admit that Germany was a rather special situation. It's up to each country to decide for themselves what manner of speech is protected or not. I cannot say whether laws banning pro-Nazi and Holocaust Denial speech and writings has prevented the rise of a new Nazi Party, though I rather doubt it. For most of the Cold War the two Germanys were in no position to do anything of the kind, and I don't think the possibility of a return is going to happen now.
That all being said, it is one of the kinks in international policing that where extradition treaties exist, the potential exists. I'm not sure what the solution is. We certainly don't want to get rid of extradition treaties, so I suppose the litmus test must be whether the law being broken in one country is in fact a legitimate law in the country the accused or convicted has fled to, and I'm assuming that's the general standard in most countries.
I do know that Euroskeptics in Britain in particular have been quite concerned that stronger European-wide judicial and law-enforcement treaties and laws make it possible that someone could be arrested for something completely legal in Britain and sent to the country where the alleged offense occurred, but it's clear in this case that either the risk was overstated or the British courts seem ready not to comply.
"In principle I'm against all forms of censorship, but one does have to admit that Germany was a rather special situation. It's up to each country to decide for themselves what manner of speech is protected or not."
Nonsense. If it is up to each country to decide what speech is protected and which is not, then you are not (in principle or otherwise) against censorship at all, let alone "all forms of censorship."
You know, nothing annoys me more than someone deciding what I must be for or against, or must believe or not believe. I don't think what I said was all that confusing.
I have little enough power in my own country (Canada) which at times totters over the censorship line on its own (recently Macleans Magazine and that bigot Mark Steyn have taken to one of our legislatively-created pseudo-courts; the Human Rights Commission of BC, over some nasty written comments about Islam). Germany's recent history is rather unique and I think, after the collapse of the Nazi regime, there was some justification for banning Nazi activities and pro-Nazi writings and speech. I don't think it was right to sustain it for over half a century after the collapse of Nazi Germany. Let's remember here, these particular bans have their origins not in domestic German policy, but in what were essentially decrees by the occupying Allied Powers.
I don't think censorship works, and in particular doesn't work today. A Chinese citizen with moderate technical skills can easily bypass the Great Firewall (which makes me wonder why Australia is trying to create the same sort of thing), so the days when a government in a country with reasonable levels of technology can hope to keep unpleasant truths from its citizens is done.
So, to put it bluntly, I'm against censorship. I'm against Germany's continued censorship of the Neo-Nazis. But I'm also pragmatic enough to realize that a) there's nothing I can do about it or particularly want to, I don't live there and b) it doesn't work anyways. If the German people are unhappy about it, it's their responsibility to take their political leaders to task. I'll do my part in my country.
So point that strawman at someone else.
Another problem is when a state applies its laws to its citizens even abroad. For instance, an American is not allowed to go to Cuba and has to declate his revenue even if he lives abroad, Canadians are not allowed to have sex with a minor anywhere in the world, French citizens are not allowed to participate in research involving human cloning anywhere, etc.
It seems to me that some countries are treating their citizens as some kind of property.
And let's not forget about those states that give themselves the right to charge anyone for war crime wherever the crime occured and regardless of citizenship.
And that is a bad thing why?
I think generally one must distinguish between countries applying their laws to their own citizens abroad and countries applying their laws against citizens of other countries abroad. The former is not so much about treating citizens as property, but about what it means to be a citizen of a country. I retain my citizen's rights when I travel abroad, so why should I not retain my citizen's duties (including the duty to respect my country's laws)?
I can't say I'm a big fan of the German anti-Nazi-propaganda laws, especially looking at how things are enforced in the real world.
For example, it's almost impossible for me to buy a model WWII-era German aircraft with a Swastika on the tail fin, where it belongs, because that model could not be sold legally in Germany. (I could buy a model Finnish WWII warplane with a sky blue swastika, however, because the Finnish wartime swastika is exempt from the rule.)
On the other hand, I got stuck in traffic passing through Dresden a few years back because a coalition of fans of German football teams were having a rally under the railroad bridge next to the main station, cutting off all traffic on the main N-S artery. Our car was near the front of the line, and I could just see over the top of the police vans that the young hools were giving the ol'Sieg Heil salute, utterly illegal in Germany, with gobs of cops standing next to them.
What gives? It's really easy to enforce the law against model airplane manufacturers. Enforcing the law against far-right teenaged football hooligans from South Saxony villages, on the other hand, would involve physical risk to them and to the police and the bureaucratic complications inherent to any situation where the police wade in with batons, because those boys were not about to go along peacefully. (Unless anarchist squatters are the target, for some reason.)
You can't legislate away the stupid. Legislation like the German law almost always ends up affecting the easiest target for enforcement, not the most egregious violator. (For similar reasons, I am dead set against the European Charter of Fundamental Rights being given the force of law.)