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.