MEP Sarah Knafo
A young French magistrate and politician has given a stirring speech in Brussels, decrying the censorship occurring across Europe.
The Irish Government tried and failed to get hate speech laws over the line earlier this year which would have criminalised certain acts of 'gross trivialisation.'
'Gross trivialisation' of, for example, someone's gender identity almost became a crime in Ireland.
With this in mind, Side Stream News presents to the full transcript of Ms Knafo's speech this week in the EU Parliament:
Confrontation in Brussels
“For having written the Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn had to leave his country and exile himself in the United States. For having challenged British colonization, Gandhi was sentenced to 6 years in prison.
"Today, it is not in Moscow that the founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has been arrested, but here in France under Emmanuel Macron. It is not in Cuba that Elon Musk is prevented from making Twitter a space of freedom, but here in Brussels, in the Europe of Ursula von der Leyen.
"Here, in the civilization that should protect freedom of expression. Better, that invented it. Here, Europeans are muzzled, intimidated, and punished. Here, the right is silenced, censored on social media, and harassed by the judiciary, associations, and even banks.
"It is in my country, France, that the television channel C8 has just been banned from broadcasting in almost complete silence. It is in my country that young influencers are being banned by Instagram without any explanation.
"It's in my country, the land of human rights, that the public audiovisual service, funded by our taxes, decides who speaks, what we talk about, and how we talk about it. Yet, I tell you, opinions do not disappear just because their expression is silenced.
"The more you attack us, the more numerous we will become. You can censor us, but you cannot censor reality. What we cannot see on television because of you, we see in our streets every day.
"You will not stop Europeans from thinking. You will not stop Europeans from living. You will not stop Europeans from telling you we are not criminals, but dissidents. We will always prefer Tocqueville to Thierry Breton, Elon Musk to Ursula von der Leyen, and freedom to censorship.”
Meanwhile in Ireland, Twitter International Unlimited Company, which operates Elon Musk's ‘X’ platform, has alleged in new High Court proceedings that Ireland's media regulator, Coimisiún na Meán’s new Online Safety Code contradicts legal requirements for protecting and balancing fundamental rights, particularly freedom of expression.
X has accused Ireland’s media watchdog of engaging in “regulatory overreach” in its approach to restrictions on certain video content.
X wants the court to quash the commission’s October 10th decision to adopt certain sections of the Online Safety Code, which applies binding rules to video-sharing platforms headquartered in Ireland.
The code obliges the platform to 'protect people' from 'harmful video and associated content.'
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