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Am Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:51:13 -0800 schrieb Darren New:
> Ah, so, because Hitler was bad, we're going to make sure you're not
> allowed to advocate a political leader from a similar party? In spite of
> it being a democracy? :-)
No, no, no ;). Basically it's just forbidden to organize a mob randomly
murdering other people. If you lead a party which includes peoples of
mobs randomly murdering other people, but you don't tell this people
explicitly to murder, nothing prevents you of becoming Bundeskanzler (if
you get elected). The NPD exists and everyone knows, that there are Nacis
in it (and they are the mobs in Germany murdering randomly people). But
despite the failure to forbid this party was mainly due to other reasons
(german secret service had to many people in it) it is highly doubtable,
if the NPD could be forbidden on grounds of that law. Actually the
majority of current politicians right now are against forbidding them, on
the grounds, that it would legally not go through.
>
> The problem with all these sorts of things is the slippery slope, and
> the application in ways that the original authors didn't intend. That
> always happens here: the politicians pass some overly broad law,
> everyone complains it's overly broad, the politicians say "it would
> never be used in that way, that makes no sense." And then you get
> regular people being shipped off to foreign countries because they might
> be terrorists.
Well, the judges in germany are very independent and if they think the
law is overly broad and unconstitutional, they don't apply it (Ok, don't
quote me on the technical process of that - but in practice it means
going back to the drawing board for the politicians). If the politicians
make unconstitutional laws they will be sacked at some point (sometimes
it takes the highest court - but independence of that court is taken very
seriously. While I agree, that slippery slope is a problem in a lot of
cases (surveillance laws for example are going overboard right now) in
general it levels out after some time if people notice that they went
over board. BTW, I found that blog of an american law professor living in
germany quite interesting (he also writes about general stuff, but the
posts about the law made some differences clearer to me - for a german
the american law system looks ridiculous at first sight. However I think
that has mostly to do with a lack of knowledge of the details. Maybe it
is the same vice versa.):
http://andrewhammel.typepad.com/
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