I was talking about Tate because that's the first thing I found in Google and you didn't provide the proper context.
Searching for Romanian Law 107 of 2006 brings up an anti-discrimination statute and an article from civic-nation.org that says[0]:
>Anti-racism Act № 107/2006 (preceded by government decree № 31/2002) prohibits the operation of organizations of fascist, racist or xenophobic nature, participation in such organizations, the use of symbols of this kind, as well as the occultism surrounding personalities who were guilty of crimes against peace and humanity. The law also foresees criminal liability for the Holocaust deniers. By the end of monitoring this Article has not been used towards anyone.
My read on this is that it's substantially similar to the German constitutional prohibition on Nazis. And as I said in the footnotes before, I do not believe Nazis are entitled to free speech, on the grounds that their explicit political ideology is to censor and kill people. If there's an example of this prohibition being unfairly used against people who are not Nazis, then I will happily rail against it and add it to my list of "shitty things governments do". But as it stands this is not "evidence that America is the only country with free speech". It's about as much of a difference as permissive licensing vs. the GPL.
I still agree that the anti-abortion protester in the UK was being censored. To square that off with my prior paragraph of assertions, anti-abortion activists don't pose a threat to free speech like how Nazis do. They are irksome and morally repugnant but not censorious.
Australia has no express right to free speech, which is a constitutional problem. However, Canada does has a right to free expression, which functions the same as it does in Europe. In either case, the amount of potential or actual harm to free speech is nowhere near "jailed for 20 years for editing Wikipedia" levels of censorship.
And America is not a free speech haven either - in fact, our censorship problem is arguably worse than Europe's. Left-wing activists were routinely investigated and attacked for decades by the CIA and FBI. The intelligence community uses classification and espionage law to silence and punish whistleblowers. This was all done under the auspices of a textually unmodified 1st Amendment.
It's not clear, at least to me, what's your actual point. You try to argue that other countries besides the US also support free speech; and your argument is that... it's actually good that they don't support free speech. I am a bit confused.
My main argument is that America is not exceptionally free, at least among western powers. Since one of the things you specifically pointed out was an anti-fascism law, I have to at least get over that rhetorical hurdle.
On paper, a law saying you can't be a particular political ideology sounds like you just tore the beating heart straight out of free speech's chest. When you realize, "oh wait it's just the Nazis", it's less bad, and in practice speech is still mostly free in countries with these laws.
And on paper America has the strongest free speech protections in the world. In practice, we've had government censorship regimes for centuries. And our legal system is entirely blind to private censorship enabled by monopolies.
Well, it wasn't me who pointed that out, but I agree with that. Whether it is bad, less bad or good is quite irrelevant to whether it is true. America had government censorship regimes for centuries, I fully agree with that. It has an awful government plagued by similar kinds of bureaucratic diseases that we can notice elsewhere. What is more, it is a quite atrocious government with regards to human rights of its non-citizens and sometimes even with regards to its own citizens. That said, it still provides far more speech protections than any other country in the world.
Searching for Romanian Law 107 of 2006 brings up an anti-discrimination statute and an article from civic-nation.org that says[0]:
>Anti-racism Act № 107/2006 (preceded by government decree № 31/2002) prohibits the operation of organizations of fascist, racist or xenophobic nature, participation in such organizations, the use of symbols of this kind, as well as the occultism surrounding personalities who were guilty of crimes against peace and humanity. The law also foresees criminal liability for the Holocaust deniers. By the end of monitoring this Article has not been used towards anyone.
My read on this is that it's substantially similar to the German constitutional prohibition on Nazis. And as I said in the footnotes before, I do not believe Nazis are entitled to free speech, on the grounds that their explicit political ideology is to censor and kill people. If there's an example of this prohibition being unfairly used against people who are not Nazis, then I will happily rail against it and add it to my list of "shitty things governments do". But as it stands this is not "evidence that America is the only country with free speech". It's about as much of a difference as permissive licensing vs. the GPL.
I still agree that the anti-abortion protester in the UK was being censored. To square that off with my prior paragraph of assertions, anti-abortion activists don't pose a threat to free speech like how Nazis do. They are irksome and morally repugnant but not censorious.
Australia has no express right to free speech, which is a constitutional problem. However, Canada does has a right to free expression, which functions the same as it does in Europe. In either case, the amount of potential or actual harm to free speech is nowhere near "jailed for 20 years for editing Wikipedia" levels of censorship.
And America is not a free speech haven either - in fact, our censorship problem is arguably worse than Europe's. Left-wing activists were routinely investigated and attacked for decades by the CIA and FBI. The intelligence community uses classification and espionage law to silence and punish whistleblowers. This was all done under the auspices of a textually unmodified 1st Amendment.
[0] https://civic-nation.org/romania/government/legislation/anti...