German President Refuses To Sign Child Porn Law
by piffey
German President Horst Köhler refused to sign an internet child pornography law on the grounds that he needed “supplementary information” to make a decision. While the law has already passed with the German people in Parliament he denied the law because critics say the law would block access to “other, innocent sites and therefore amounted to censorship” which is illegal according to the German constituion. Excerpt below:
“The law was written under the previous “grand coalition” government between Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and the centre-left Social Democrats and was pushed by then CDU Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen.
Merkel’s party and their new partners in government, the pro-business Free Democrats – who opposed the measure – agreed during coalition negotiations last month not to put the law into practice.
But because it had already been passed by both houses of the German parliament, it could not simply be dropped. Köhler’s refusal to sign it means it is now effectively stalled until the new government finds a constitutional way to kill it.
According to a Saturday report in business magazine Wirtschaftswoche, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière and Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger had agreed to kibosh the law by ordering the federal police not to act upon it. However, that would leave the law hanging in place.”
This attempt to stall this law is important since we are seeing a continuing restriction of citizen’s rights, particularly in respect to their effective use of the Internet. Britain’s Pirate-Finder General and other attempts to regulate and police the Internet can only lead to further restrictions and further censorship, disabling the Internet’s ability to function as a free forum. Child pornography will always be accessible on the darker side of the Internet, the side “400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined world wide web” (Michael K. Bergman via The Guardian). This is no reason to allow Internet legislation to fill lawbooks and make a foundation for the further restriction of our ability to communicate. Besides — the Internet has proven to regulate itself and reality when its users care enough.
