Peter De Roover criticises the European initiative against “hate speech”

In the Advisory Committee for European Affairs, Peter De Roover sharply expressed his concern about European Commissioner Didier Reynders’ plan to turn hate speech into a European cross-border crime. This would require each Member State to apply minimum rules for defining and sanctioning crimes. “The Eastern Bloc genie is out of the bottle once again,” said the N-VA parliamentary group chairman, referring to the fact that in the 1960s, ‘hate’ penetrated into international treaties under pressure from the communist states.

Peter De Roover first welcomed Didier Reynders back to Parliament, where he had served as a minister for many years. Peter De Roover took advantage of the event to criticise the recently proposed plan to regulate hate speech in Europe. “It seems to me that by doing so, you are risking the endangerment of the freedom of speech. Opinions that we do not find acceptable are all too readily dismissed as hate speech. Your plan follows an overly voluntaristic interpretation of the concept of ‘hate speech’ that is very difficult to define. What’s more, you want us to prosecute hate speech in the same way everywhere in Europe.”

Peter De Roover: “The Eastern Bloc genie is out of the bottle once again”

“The desire to curb hate speech once entered international law at the urging of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, in defiance of Western democracies,” the N-VA group chairman continued. “It seems to me that the Eastern Bloc genie is out of the bottle once again. The phenomenon of hate speech should not be dealt with by government repression. We must be very careful that the remedy, in your proposal the risk of censorship, is not worse than the affliction, or even worsens it,” Peter De Roover concludes.