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Comment by sanxiyn | Hacker News Reader

Such as Switzerland.

Many European countries (like Germany, Italy, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Finland, parts of UK*, Poland, Russia) have blasphemy laws going as far as mandating prison terms, even if they rarely convict or even indict anyone under them.

* corrected from "UK".

Formally abolished in England and Wales in 2008. Still on the statute books for Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Although a lot of anti-racist hate speech stuff could be used for the same effect in England and Wales.

Governments are wisening up. Tinfoil hat me says they're replacing "blasphemy laws" with more politically palatable yet more vague "Hate speech" laws that are ridiculously loose and can be applied how they see fit, including prosecuting blasphemy-like criticism of Religion. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_by_country#So...

I don't see anything ridiculously loose about that law:

> No person may publish, propagate, advocate or communicate words based on one or more of the prohibited grounds, against any person, that could reasonably be construed to demonstrate a clear intention to be hurtful,be harmful or to incite harm, promote or propagate hatred. [65]

> The "prohibited grounds" include race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth

That sentence you quoted is incredibly vague. What exactly does it mean to promote hate?

Or lets take that quote and pick one cross section of word salad that they can use as a potential cross-product with legalese:

"No person may [communicate] words based on [occupation] against any person that can demonstrate an intention to be [hurtful]." Yes occupation is a protected group in that law.

Its all fine and dandy while this law is used to prosecute anti-lgbt people as an example. But that law will quickly be used to shut down legitimate debate and civilian disagreement when they can reframe the group/person being hurt by words as a victim. Just look at the heated debate regarding immigration. Questioning large scale immigration would be "hate speech" under this law, whilst simultaneously not prosecuting "hate speech" against a closed-borders group of people. Its essentially legislating societal-level feelings as valid.

You know, instead of actually having a debate and putting it down on paper as law and as an absolute. E.g. If we want free borders or large scale immigration, then lets just make a law allowing it.

"I think many religious Jewish groups fuel the Zionist sentiment in the Israeli government exacerbating the conflict with Palestine. Their influence must be curtailed"

Boom!, 10 months in jail for antisemitism.

What does "belief" mean? Is calling someone an idiot for believing that earth is flat hate speech?

Honesty I think you could probably a make a case for any insult falling under that law.

Nowadays, most Western countries with anti-blasphemy laws on the books still have those laws precisely because they are never enforced. If they were enforced, there would be an outcry sufficient to have them immediately overturned.

It is like how the monarch in many a constitutional monarchy today technically still has power, but any actual attempt to use that power would probably lead to the end of that monarchy, at least in its current structure.

2018: "In Europe, Speech Is an Alienable Right: [the European Court of Human Rights] upheld an Austrian woman’s conviction for disparaging the Prophet Muhammad."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr...

I think laws like blasphemy laws and ones against hate speech are mostly there to serve as a last resort in cases that can't reasonably be defended by anyone. There's a lot of grey area that's hard to define very clearly in law. So the laws generic blankets in order to cover a lot of options, then it's left to the prosecution to only take action when the offense is really egregious.

Not a prison term but just recently a Romanian member of Parliament has been fined by Romania's anti-discrimination committee for (they say) putting the person of Virgin Mary in a non-appropriate context (he had called her "surrogate mother").

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