Verfassungsblog

There are many countries that have been in the position that the US has been, though few of them have been as strong democracies prior to falling to this state. I'd recommend the tactics in the two "Rules" section of this blog post: https://verfassungsblog.de/the-authoritarian-regime-survival-guide/ Though, personally, I'm having a lot of trouble following some of them...

I think this is the point. All of these arrangements are ultimately by consent. Holyrood agrees to recognise Westminster's power, just as the UK agrees to recognise the ECHR. This idea of 'power' is a complicated one. What 'power' does England have over Scotland other than the power that Scotland has agreed to accept (see Northern Ireland for what happens when one of the devolved nations is conflicted over whether to accept that power)? What 'power' does the ECHR have over any of its signatories other than that which they've chosen to accept? There's a well-written and detailed exploration of the negative consequences of withdrawing from the ECHR here, and what is power except the ability to impose negative consequences for not following instructions? https://verfassungsblog.de/uks-potential-withdrawal-european-conventio…

The problem is that the primate of the ECJ over national supreme/constitutional courts is not settled [1]. As far as I understand, it is a fiction where everybody plays along, but an actual conflict can lead to a major constitutional crisis (see for example [2]). In practice diplomatic solutions are found to avoid direct clashes. [1] ECJ has of course claimed otherwise, but some national constitutional courts reserve the right to interpret and follow their own constitutions, even when they would lead to diverging from ECJ rulings. In fact they might not have other options. [2] https://verfassungsblog.de/national-courts-cannot-override-cjeu-judgme…

https://verfassungsblog.de/confidence-and-trust/ has an excellent take on this. Some key sentences: "The reasons are obvious: with the right to issue directives, politicians could theoretically influence who is investigated and who is indicted — and, even more relevant, who is not. … The counter-argument has also been known for a long time: The right to give instructions exists so that someone will bear the political responsibility…"

For those interested in some of the finer legal aspects of the situation, here's an interesting article in German (excellent discussion there as well): http://verfassungsblog.de/erlaubte-schmaehkritik-die-verfassungsrechtl… Böhmermann may have gone a little bit overboard on his exemplary "Schmähgedicht" -- unneccessarily long and nasty just to make a point, other indicators are the music, the flag in the background and subtitles only for the poem (making the example much stronger than the context / introduction) -- but given the context, he should be fine.

These are one of those things that are hard to get statistics of due to the nature of the subject, but going to any website that features AI generated content like CivitAI will show you a lot more naked AI generated women than men, and that the images of women are greatly better in quality than the men. None of the people actually exist, of course, but some things stem from this: 1. There are probably AI portals that are OK with uploading nonconsensual sexual images of people. I am not about to go looking for those, but the ratio of women to men on those sites is likely similar. 2. The fact that the quality of women is better than the quality of men speaks to vastly more training being done on women 3. Because there's so much training on women it's just easier to use AI for nefarious purposes on women than men (have to find custom trained LORAs to get male anatomy right, for example). I did try to look for statistics out of curiosity, but most just cite a number without evidence. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/women-face-new-sexual-harassment-wit… https://verfassungsblog.de/deepfakes-ncid-ai-regulation/ https://www.csis.org/analysis/left-shoulder-worries-ai

Well, I am not the only person who draws the conclusion that the ECHR judgement sets up a morally dubious hierarchy of genocides, in which the memory of the Holocaust is viewed as more worthy of protection than the memory of the Armenian genocide, and in which the threat of antisemitism is taken more seriously than that of anti-Armenianism. Here is a law professor making the exact same criticisms (Professor Uladzislau Belavusau at the University of Amsterdam): https://www.echrblog.com/2015/11/guest-commentary-on-grand-chamber.htm… and also https://verfassungsblog.de/armenian-genocide-v-holocaust-in-strasbourg… Similar criticisms have been voiced by Ariana Macaya (law professor at the University of Costa Rica): http://www.qil-qdi.org/focus-sur-perincek-c-suisse-la-question-de-la-l… (she writes in French, but if you can't read French, Google Translate does a pretty good job of it) It is odd to accuse me of "projecting" in my criticism of a court decision, when law professors express essentially the same criticism. Are they projecting too?

Google: CUII (Clearingstelle fuer Urheberrecht im Internet). It's essentially a Dachverband of ISPs, bypassing all legal requirements and the judicative system to block domains across all ISPs. There's this kid who found out about it and scraped their API, then created the cuiiliste [dot] de website where you can check what kind of domains are blocked by ISPs. The verfassungsblog wrote about it, too, from a legal perspective [1] (German). [1] https://verfassungsblog.de/netzsperren-cuii/

China doesn't require pre-installed apps but the Chinese government require all data processing and storage to be conducted within China with complete source code access. India chose to back off on data sovereignty [0] because it would have had a side effect of making Indian IT Offshoring less competitive plus to help make negotiating a US-India BTA easier [1]. [0] - https://verfassungsblog.de/cross-border-data-flows-and-indias-digital-… [1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-25/us-seeks-india-trad…

Sure, I have painted the incident, let‘s paint the norm. Just two ministers of the last government have sued 1400 people using 188 StGB [1]. An FDP politician sues 250 people this way in a month alone. We have seen an increase of lawsuits using this paragraph of 215% in the last three years. [1]: https://verfassungsblog.de/ehre-wem-kritik-gebuhrt/

Related and you will need it: https://verfassungsblog.de/the-authoritarian-regime-survival-guide/

The Digital Services Act is supposed to provide some legal recourse, at least in the European Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Services_Act https://verfassungsblog.de/dsa-fails/ However, ask the politicians at the European Commission, and they will boast that it is about this: > By summer 2023, the first very concrete effects of the #DSA will be visible for all users. This includes: Accessible "button" to easily flag illegal content https://nitter.it/ThierryBreton/status/1592856203935510528#m Which just happens to be what the reviewer was complaining about (ways to report "objectionable content").

Some more information about this case and overall context: https://verfassungsblog.de/travelling-courts-and-strategic-visitation/

German here: We don't dislike eastern europeans at all, at least not on any society wide level. Of course, there are exceptions. We do dislike backslides into authoritarianism in governance, like in Hungary (who's Victor Orban declared 'illiberal democracy' [1]). 1: https://verfassungsblog.de/illiberal-democracy-beyond-hungary-2/

Here's two articles I saw today about it: https://verfassungsblog.de/who-controls-a-facebook-page/ (english) https://www.cr-online.de/blog/2018/06/06/fanpage-urteil-des-eugh-10-fr… (German)

Well, you found an actual federal judge that wrote an actual paper, even if you linked to some third rate news source instead. Here's the paper: http://bayern.de/Gutachten_Prof_Di_Fabio Here's a rebuttal: http://verfassungsblog.de/dem-freistaat-zum-gefallen-ueber-udo-di-fabi…

> as far as I understand that did not affect the individuals' ability to to bank Did you read the article? The judge reported closed/blocked bank accounts, booking being cancelled (successful booked, then later cancelled by the companies)... https://verfassungsblog.de/sanctions-us-icc-united-states/ From a other poster: > He cannot: open or maintain accounts with Google, Amazon, Apple, or any US company; make hotel reservations (Expedia canceled his booking in France hours after he made it); conduct online commerce, since he can't know if the packaging is American; use any major credit card (Visa, Mastercard, Amex are all American); access normal banking services, even with non-American banks, as banks worldwide close sanctioned accounts; conduct virtually any financial transaction. Same with recently Garry Kasparov been designated a "T" by Russia. Banks simply do not take risks dealing with hot customers, as this can affect their entire business (especially if they have branches in the US). So they rather railroad individuals that have little power, then take the risk that they will lose millions if the US sanctions their bank. Its also linked to a lot of other things. Somebody who worked at a bank gave a description yesterday on how it works. And if your on that list, you are really in a world of hurt.

References: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krymnash [2] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/03/07/navalnys-policy-shift-on-cri… [2] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/04/26/most-russians-support-annexa… [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_green_men_(Russo-Ukrainian_War) [4] https://www.fpri.org/books/less-know-better-sleep-russias-road-terror-… [5] https://theintercept.com/2020/06/28/welcome-to-chechnya-gay-men/ [6]https://imgur.com/gallery/enby-kyiv-ukraine-jul-sep-2023-fcjsIoI [7] https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2014-09-03/russian-milit… [8] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/26/russia-admits-soldiers-i… [9]https://jamestown.org/program/levadas-last-poll-on-chechnya-russians-s… [10] https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2022/09/my-country-right-or-wro… [11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Tatarstani_sovereignty_referendum [12] https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/09/30/fictitious-annexation-follows-voti… [13] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/16/ukraine-russia-truce-cri… [14] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/03/23/tatarstan-v… [15]…

Or us Portuguese - up until 1974 we had PIDE (translated: International and State Defense Police); so within living memory of many in power today. They did all the things any "good" oppressive police force of a semi-fascist to fully-fascist state does: receive anonymous complaints from conspirators, arrest people and torture them for reasons ranging from the political ("being a communist") to the moral ("being homosexual"), and generally make sure everyone's lives are too miserable and filled with fear to dream of overthrowing the powers-that-be. Our concern with privacy is so prevalent that fairly recently the collection (and subsequent usage) of metadata by police was deemed unconstitutional[1]. This was met with a lot of complaints by investigators, and while there's some sectors pushing for a constitutional revision, this seems unlikely at the moment, but not entirely off the table. [1] - https://verfassungsblog.de/how-the-data-retention-legislation-led-to-a…

If you speak German you might be interested in this article regarding the very similar case of the US Base Rammstein located in Germany, which is used for drone strikes in the middle east https://verfassungsblog.de/ramstein-deutschlands-mitverantwortung-fuer… It's difficult to give a complete summary but basically there already have been some judgments by courts in Germany regarding the air base. Those judgments state that there are certain obligations arising from the constitution and also from international law when it comes to supporting the US in coordinating drone strikes. Things get tricky because it's not even clear what the US army is doing exactly in Rammstein and also the German governments obligations under international law (in particular their contract with the US) have to be considered when restricting their duty not to allow targeted killings. I don't think you could argue that the current judgment "leaves a loophole" because the BVerfG might reasonably make a judgment in the future that the German government may not allow CIA monitoring in Germany. (Or it might not do this, but this judgement does not indicate anything in this regard)

I am not predicting anything, this is how it has been implemented. You are aware this law is already in effect and thousands have been deleted/banned? But this debate is pointless because you clearly neither speak German, understand German law, nor are interested in revising your opinion that this is anything other than a fight of the righteous against the bad. The law is likely unconstitutional, widely overreaching, and does in fact delete these things: https://verfassungsblog.de/das-netzdg-und-die-vermutung-fuer-die-freih… https://netzpolitik.org/2018/die-meinungsfreiheit-und-das-netzdg-schwe… https://www.zeit.de/digital/internet/2017-03/heiko-maas-gesetzentwurf-… There are countless examples, e.g. Facebook censoring satire accounts: http://meedia.de/2018/01/03/netzdg-twitter-sperrt-account-des-satirema… You are celebrating authoritarian censorship because you think it targets the right people. You are calling me out for something you have no firsthand knowledge or expertise on because of tribalism. Stop.

Somewhat related in rulings about the President's control of various agencies is the unitary executive, which has gained popularity (like originalism) in right-leaning circles in recent years (thanks Scalia): * https://archive.is/https://www.vox.com/scotus/397729/supreme-court-uni… * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory Right-leaning folks are all for it: * https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/714860 Others less so: * https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndlr/vol98/iss1/3/ Pre-Trump, one famous SCOTUS ruling determined that some agencies were / acted 'in between' branches: > What the Court held in Humphrey’s Executor is that if an agency is of the latter kind—that is, the agency’s job description involves a mixture of quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial functions that are not within the President’s explicit Article II powers—then it is up to Congress to determine whether this kind of agency’s heads serve at the President’s pleasure. If such an agency’s role is essentially “to carry into effect legislative policies embodied in statute,” then Congress may protect its members against discharge except for good cause. * https://verfassungsblog.de/the-unbearable-lightness-of-the-unitary-exe… * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphrey%27s_Executor_v._United_States