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Comment by themartorana | Hacker News Reader

Part of me starts to think this is the difference between having press freedoms outlined in a constitution, vs them being tolerated by the whim of the acting government, but then I look at the U.S. and the prosecution of reporters and whistle blowers and realize how tenuous press freedoms really are - anywhere.

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Press freedom is part of the German Grundgesetz (the constitution) as well, so there's really no difference here.

The German Grundgesetz even puts all those basic rights right at the beginning and not just in the amendments.

This strikes me as a weasel worded statement. The Bill of Rights was conceived along side the constitution and kept out of the original constitution largely for political reasons relating to getting a very contentious document approved by the required minimum number of states for passage.

What's important in particular about having those rights at the "beginning" of the Grundgesetz is that the first 20 articles are immutable and cannot be changed unlike the latter parts of the constitution.

This is not true. Only articles 1 and 20 can't be changed. For the rest in between no such guarantee applies and they were changed a few times in the past. Though most likely restricting any of the freedoms severely would be ruled unconstitutional by the very first article.

Of course, the constitution is just a piece of paper, and what's protecting the rights in practice is a political system (especially courts) that tries hard to keep them.

Most of the rights already come pre-holed with exceptions, though. And lots of them contradict each other. There's lots of leeway, to justify a very wide range of policies as different `tradeoffs' between the rights.

The problem, in my opinion, when I see what is going on in different countries, is that even the constitutional rights are no longer a security belt. This belt is cut by different means. Just change the wording or invent special exceptions or find a loophole, where not enough people go against ... The ways are endless, how constitutional rights are torn apart and I fear this is only the beginning.

In the words of Malory Archer: "It's the government. Even if it wasn't legal, they'd enforce it."

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