German propses ban on free speech regarding holocaust denial
There’s compensation, then there’s over-compensation:
Not content with merely banning holocaust denial, now they [Germany] are proposing an EU law that would prosecute anyone who denies any claimed genocide, war crime or crime against humanity.
Berlin’s draft EU directive extends the idea of Holocaust denial to the “gross minimisation of genocide out of racist and xenophobic motives”, to include crimes dealt with by the International Criminal Court…
The draft text states: “Each member state shall take the measures necessary to ensure that the following intentional conduct is punishable: ‘publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising of crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes as defined in’… the Statute of the ICC.”This is absolutely absurd. It essentially rules out any defense for anyone accused of crimes in the ICC. If someone is accused of war crimes and they or someone else denies that they committed the crime, they’ve broken this proposed law.
Why don’t they understand this? Any attempt to restrict what people can think or say is a violation of civil rights. You might dislike what some people have to say, I might dislike what they have to say, but there is no fundamental right not to be offended.
The government has no business deciding what is the official belief that can be expressed, that should be left to scholars, historians and others to debate.
