From: lull@acm.org (John Lull)
Date: Mon, 29 Jan 1996 09:25:15 +0800
To: olmur@dwarf.bb.bawue.de (Olmur)
Subject: Re: "German service cuts Net access" (to Santa Cruz)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960128115634.00977b14@panix.com>
Message-ID: <310c0c26.30666226@smtp.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


On Sun, 28 Jan 1996 21:41 +0100 (MET), Olmur wrote:

> It's illegal in Germany to publish material denying the holocaust.  In
> the same moment this guy sent his book (?) per snail-mail from Canada
> to Germany he commited a crime here in Germany.

How pray tell is a person in Canada supposed to know that?  I (in the
US) certainly had no idea Germany had such a law.

Are you saying that, if I ran a bookstore, and accepted international
mail orders, I would have to screen every order to ensure I did not
ship something offensive to the German government?  And if I did fill
such an order, and without ever having set foot in Germany, I could be
arrested on my next trip to Europe, extradited to Germany, and
imprisoned for doing something that is constitutionally protected in
the US?

Alternatively, what if I were to post to usenet a message denying the
Holocaust, and one person in Germany retrieved that message.  Would I
then be subject to arrest and extradition to Germany?


Mike Duvos wrote in another message:

> It is interesting to note that there is no specific law
> prohibiting free speech for Holocaust Agnostics in Germany. The
> actual laws under which such cases are prosecuted are libel laws,
> which have been liberally interpreted to mean that one may not
> "libel" deceased Jews as a class or their memory in the minds of
> their surviving relatives.

If in fact this is merely a judicial interpretation of an apparently
unrelated law, it just plain ridiculous to expect people in other
countries to be aware of it.


If this is really what Germany wants, then it sounds like time to
totally cut Germany off from the internet, simply in self
preservation.  No one can reasonably be expected to research even the
clearly-written laws worldwide that might conceivably apply in such
cases, much less far-fetched judicial interpretations of such laws.


Olmur continued:

> I don't think it's astonishing that Denmark imprissoned this guy and
> transported him to Germany.  It's a normal thing that one country
> imprisons a criminal another country is searching and the delivers
> him/her to the country in question.

I, on the other hand, find this QUITE astonishing.  His actions were
legal in both Canada and Denmark (probably everywhere in the world
except Germany), and he did nothing in Germany.

Of course, I find the US actions in kidnapping people in other
countries quite indefensible also, but at least in those cases the
persons involved clearly knew they were violating at least US law, and
in most cases were violating their local laws as well.