German secrecy busted by Wikipedia
We read:
"Two German men who murdered an actor in 1990 are suing Wikipedia, claiming its description of their crimes impinges on their privacy. The case pits the United States's first amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech, against German privacy and criminal laws, which dictate that after a certain period a crime is spent and cannot be referred to. Britain has similar rules on the reporting of lesser crimes.
The two men were sentenced to life in 1993. They were released in 2007 and 2008. But their lawyer, Alexander Stopp, said German courts allowed a criminal's name to be withheld in news reports once a set period had expired. "They should be able … lead a life without being publicly stigmatised" for their crime, he told The New York Times. "A criminal has a right to privacy, too, and a right to be left alone." [Why? A Leftist opinion, I think]
The German editors of Wikipedia have removed the killers' names from the German-language version about the victim, Walter Sedlmayr. But Mr Stopp has also filed a suit in Germany demanding that the Wikimedia Foundation remove their names from the English-language article.
This has triggered intense online debate. Jennifer Granick, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group, said US law "takes it as an article of faith that people must be allowed to publish truthful information about historical events". "A foreign power should not be able to censor publications in the United States, regardless of whether doing so suits the country's domestic law."
The English-language Wikipedia article about Mr Sedlmayr notes that details of the killers' names are available from online sources in Germany.
Floyd Abrams, a prominent first amendment lawyer, said every judge on the US Supreme Court would agree that the Wikipedia article "is easily, comfortably protected by the first amendment". But Germany had come up with a different balance between the right to privacy and the public's right to know, Mr Abrams said, and "once you're in the business of suppressing speech, the quest for more speech to suppress is endless".
Source
6 comments:
Only 14 and 15 years for a murder conviction? Sounds like it may have been some pansy US judge.
The Quest to "internationalize" our laws will have one of two results - we will either realize the folly of such reasoning, and just tell the world to "get stuffed" as our Founding Fathers did over 200 years ago, or we will end up under Sharia Law, with every public expression governed by the "morality police!"
I agree with Anonymous. Once, we respected human life so much that, if you took somebody else's life, your own was forfeited. Then it was decided (rightly or wrongly) that this attitude was perverse. However,the view was that, although you would not be put to death, you would be dead to society; you would never see the outside of prison. Now, apparently, "for the term of his natural life" means 14 or 15 years.
Commission of a crime against another member of the public is not a "private" matter. It is a matter of "Public" record. If you don't like being called a murderer, don't commit murder.
Germany has been messed up for a long time.
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