TL;DR: if you break the law, expect to get punished. The operators knew they were breaking the law, so involved sites in that domain were blocked. I.e. not a ".cat" generic blockage, but a specific action driven from a court.
Did you even read the article? Or did you just jerk-reply in an effort to criticize people or the movement?
> First, the content in question here is essentially political speech, which the European Court of Human Rights has ruled as deserving of a higher level of protection than some other forms of speech. Even though the speech concerns a referendum that has been ruled illegal, the speech does not in itself pose any imminent threat to life or limb.
What the Spanish government did is considered censorship under any reasonable system of law. Justifying one "wrong" with another is not gonna get anyone anywhere anytime. But since the Spanish government is fond of censorship, this reaction shouldn't come as a surprise.
> What the Spanish government did is considered censorship under any reasonable system of law.
That's simply put... bulshit, I'm far from supporting the ultra right wing catholic goverment from Madrid, but spreading plain lies to victimize yourself doesn't make them true.
To start, the judiciary isn't part of the Spanish government, it's an independent branch like Congress. Like in most or all western countries. These actions have been taken by the order of Catalan judges.
If someone thinks the laws the judges are interpreting are unconstitutional, or against European treaties, they can denounce those laws against the Spanish Constitutional Court, or the appropriate European court.
If they think the interpretation is what's flawed, they can appeal and / or denounce the judges to the Spanish Supreme Court. If the argument would become that the judiciary is corrupt and owned by the Government, from the Barcelona courts all the way up to the Supreme Court; it should be remembered that the Spanish Supreme Court sentenced a Ministro del Interior (like Secretary of State, the de-facto most powerful position after the President) to 10 years in prison.
There's a system of law in Spain, is called the constitution. And the unilateral call for seccession or doing a referendum not allowed by the constitution or the courts is not allowed in any democracy.
I'm in favor of a referendum so the catalans can decide if they want to be in Spain or not. But I'm not in favor of a unilateral decision.
That’s not an option, the rules of the European Convention on Human Rights – which protect this - stand above the spanish constitution.
I expect this will go further up to the European Court of Human Rights, and, like in previous cases where for example German law (and constitutional changes) conflicted with these protections, the European Convention on Human Rights will be ruled to stand above any national law or constitution.
Yeah, my grandfather was also given a death sentence under the rule of the law, because of his political ideas. That was Spain. Laws can be immoral. Breaking immoral laws is a duty of everyone. Now these immoral laws are applied to Catalans who want to vote, but next it can be you.
Women wouldn't be voting if they never broke the law first.
Giving a Tax amnesty to very rich tax dodgers (as the current Spanish government has done recently) has been ruled to be against the Rule of The Law and the Spanish Constitution, yes? Who is going to jail for this? No one.
The constitution only matters when it matters to some.
No one here is discussing whether the referendum is legal or not, but you keep bringing this subject up. I am not Catalan or even Spanish, so I don't care a bit for it.
What's being argued here is that seizing the .cat TLD when a page registered in it was hosting "unlawful" content consists in pure and simple censorship. It would be similar to the US government taking control of the .com TLD because some website hosted on a .com domain is selling drugs. This is censorship.
To quote the article (which apparently you didn't read) again:
> Whether it's allegations of sedition or any other form of unlawful or controversial speech, domain name intermediaries should not be held responsible for the content of websites that utilize their domains. If such content is unlawful, a court order directed to the publisher or host of that content is the appropriate way for authorities to deal with that illegality, rather than the blanket removal of entire domains from the Internet.
It was not political speech: the blocked site included private information of citizens (census), without permission. You can not use your power as regional government to ignore the Constitution.
In the broad sense of the word, yes, it is censorship. But I do not think it falls under political speech.
The content blocked is content being announced by an official entity (Generalitat) containing information about the unilateral organization of a referendum. The Generalitat as an official organism needs to abide by the existing constitutional laws. The judge as initial measure, has dictated to retrieve all official material with information regarding the organization of the referendum. No other pages from dotCAT have been seized, including unofficial ones with information about the referendum.
The EFF should also take into account that the Generalitat has unlawfully obtained private information from millions of citizens in order to be able to create a list of possible voters.
>Whether it's allegations of sedition or any other form of unlawful or controversial speech, domain name intermediaries should not be held responsible for the content of websites that utilize their domains. If such content is unlawful, a court order directed to the publisher or host of that content is the appropriate way for authorities to deal with that illegality, rather than the blanket removal of entire domains from the Internet.
I am trying to follow the situation in Catalonia, and I have one question: Is any kind of publication (done by private citizens) about the referendum actually illegal in Spain? Thanks.
That seems to be in reference to the referendum website operated by the local government (http://www.referendum.cat/), but I read several reports of private citizens with no affiliation with Catalonia's govt being raided by the police just for mirroring websites.
I don't know if the EFF is aware that the site has citizen personal information without permission. Who protects us as citizens against rebel regional government putting online private information against the rule of law?
To be fair, it is very difficult to find unbiased and knowledgeable people writing about this. It is best to not rely on only one kind of source if you want to form an opinion.
I do not think the article is so biased. Puigdemont has totally ignored the law and used his position in power to organize a referendum without any kind of warranties with the only intention to provoke a police intervention from Madrid's government and thus increase the support to his cause.
If the real intention was to organize a referendum, it could have been done with preparation, lawfully and negotiated with other regional political forces who are also supporting it.
ElPais, as most of newspapers in Spain have a position regarding the celebration of the referendum, and they have been very biased before with other information, but in this case the content is spot-on.
That said, the law is just a tool used by the people to live peacefully in a society. If people are not happy about it, the law needs to be changed.
No. It is though illegal that a public institution (using of course public founds from ALL Spaniards) promote in any way an illegal action. The Spanish term is "prevaricación" (perversion of justice), is commonly used when a public servant use his power to make knowingly an illegal action.
Note: This is what I read recently regarding this issue, but I am not a law expert, so take this with a grain of salt.
it is illegal for privately owned publications to publish government calls for the referendum. They receive threatening letters asking them to comply, and many pulications thus refuse to publish these calls.
Also, the didn't government didn't ruled the referendum illegal a constitutional COURT did it. And the detentions and search were ordered by a JUDGE from Barcelona that not long ago was awarded by the same Catalan government that now is criticizing him.
A court is an arm of the Kingdom of Spain, and a judge is a Kingdom employee. In US parlance, where the EFF is based, we would say the court is an arm of the government, and the judge is a government employee, thus this is a government action.
In European parlance, 'the government' often means the currently in-power group of legislative representatives, which causes much confusion in the US when we hear 'a new government was formed in X', or 'the government will be dissolved in Y'.
The referendum hasn't been ruled illegal. The constitutional court grants an automatic stay on any law at the Spanish central government request. Automatic. They haven't made a judgement.
And by the way, this is a political problem that the Spanish government refuses to tackle politically, making it a criminal issue. Is it criminal to want to not belong to a country that thinks that promoting a referendum is a crime?
I think that the Spanish Constitutional Court can be hardly considered independent of the Spanish government (most of its members have been historically appointed by the PP and the PSOE, the main Spanish parties, see [1]), so I don't think EFF's point here is invalid, even if clarifications are possible. Without knowing the specifics I'm inclined to think the decision by Barcelona's judge would be just a consequence of the Constitutional's Court ruling.
[1]: http://www.elmundo.es/espana/2015/08/20/55d4cbb646163f3c1c8b...: The Spanish Constitutional Court has 12 members, of which 4 are chosen by the congress, 4 are chosen by the senate, 2 are chosen by the governing party, and 2 by the "Consejo General del Poder Judicial".
The .cat domain was seized because the organization in charge of the domain IGNORED the orders issued by a JUDGE. So saying:
> "If such content is unlawful, a court order directed to the publisher or host of that content is the appropriate way for authorities to deal with that illegality, rather than the blanket removal of entire domains from the Internet."
Is simply put, bulshit. A court ordered taking down illegal calls to a referendum not approved by a democratic consitution. If that was ignored, someone had to take action.
DNS servers do not have "illegal calls" (read: thoughtcrimes) for the independence of any country. These are served by the server that the DNS points to and only on the request of the client.
You're misinformed. What's being prevented is politicians paying this with public money. Basque and Catalan independence can be talked about freely, and has been talked about non-stop for many years, including in Congress.
As far as I know, no newspaper has published anything that indicates that the puntCAT foundation ignored a clear order by a judge to censor a domain (though it is possible that they did). It's also possible that this is part of the open blanket investigation of anything the Catalan government does about the referendum.
Self determination is a human right. It is not unlawful, and a referendum about it isn’t either. If a certain law doesn’t allow for it, the law is wrong.
Of course, Spain is also calling thoroughly pacific demonstrations “tumultuous” so that they can accuse politicians of sedition, so Spain clearly doesn’t care about truth and law.
Secession is in fact illegal in most of the world countries (if not all). Auto-determination is a right recognized in the UN for regions under colonial rule. Catalonia is not a region under colonial rule, and in fact the UN does not recognize the right of auto-determination of Catalonia (Source in Spanish from a newspaper from Catalonia: http://www.lavanguardia.com/politica/20151030/54438498099/ba...).
Is the law is wrong? Maybe, in fact I might agree with the right to vote secession, but (IMHO) this needs to be done with great care, if not, any region of any state can call a vote for independence each time they disagree with the neighbors. In fact this kind of "blackmail" has been used consistently in Catalonia for years: "If you don't vote this bill, we will secede from Spain".
So, I don't think that the law that prohibit referendums for secession is completely nonsense. Exceptions of course can be made, but, is the case of Catalonia an exception? Before answer that, please, think if you have all the data to make that statement.
If I remember correctly, this started because the opposition party at the moment (PP) appeal at the constitutional court the "estatut".
If you ask me, I think that was a political (dirty) movement to gain some votes. But the point here is that since some Catalans didn't like the court resolution, they started this "blackmail": "either you accept the estatut or we will secede". We are now at the threat of secession.
Note that the quoted texts are not literal phrases said by anyone, it is just to clarify my point.
You asked one example, here is one. There are many other examples of laws passed in the Spanish congress with the support of Catalan parties in exchange of political favors.
Before anyone goes rushing off to make sure that their favorite (nyan?) .cat domain is still up:
> ... .cat domains not connected with the October 1 referendum (including eff.cat, EFF's little-known Catalan language website) have not been affected.
A more accurate title might have been "Individual .cat domains promoting sedition casualties in...", which is not what it currently seems like it means.
According to El Pais (first Spanish generalist -i.e. non-sports- newspaper in audience), the Russian intelligence is behind the support to Catalan separatists, like before pushed for the Brexit, Trump, and Le Pen: https://politica.elpais.com/politica/2017/09/22/actualidad/1...
I understand that many people here dislike El Pais; but please, do not link continuously at their most outrageusly ridiculous articles. There are still reasonable writers there. Not many, of course, but they are still there.
- judge told .cat TLD to take over some domains, setting them to display a spanish police landing page.
- .cat complied.
- Judge told .cat TLD to censor any domain that does support the referendum in any way.
- .cat replied that they run a TLD, that it's not their job to act as a censorship agency, inspecting each domain and disabling those that host websites that talk about topics that a judge specified are forbidden.
57 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadTL;DR: if you break the law, expect to get punished. The operators knew they were breaking the law, so involved sites in that domain were blocked. I.e. not a ".cat" generic blockage, but a specific action driven from a court.
> First, the content in question here is essentially political speech, which the European Court of Human Rights has ruled as deserving of a higher level of protection than some other forms of speech. Even though the speech concerns a referendum that has been ruled illegal, the speech does not in itself pose any imminent threat to life or limb.
What the Spanish government did is considered censorship under any reasonable system of law. Justifying one "wrong" with another is not gonna get anyone anywhere anytime. But since the Spanish government is fond of censorship, this reaction shouldn't come as a surprise.
That's simply put... bulshit, I'm far from supporting the ultra right wing catholic goverment from Madrid, but spreading plain lies to victimize yourself doesn't make them true.
If someone thinks the laws the judges are interpreting are unconstitutional, or against European treaties, they can denounce those laws against the Spanish Constitutional Court, or the appropriate European court.
If they think the interpretation is what's flawed, they can appeal and / or denounce the judges to the Spanish Supreme Court. If the argument would become that the judiciary is corrupt and owned by the Government, from the Barcelona courts all the way up to the Supreme Court; it should be remembered that the Spanish Supreme Court sentenced a Ministro del Interior (like Secretary of State, the de-facto most powerful position after the President) to 10 years in prison.
I'm in favor of a referendum so the catalans can decide if they want to be in Spain or not. But I'm not in favor of a unilateral decision.
I expect this will go further up to the European Court of Human Rights, and, like in previous cases where for example German law (and constitutional changes) conflicted with these protections, the European Convention on Human Rights will be ruled to stand above any national law or constitution.
Women wouldn't be voting if they never broke the law first.
Giving a Tax amnesty to very rich tax dodgers (as the current Spanish government has done recently) has been ruled to be against the Rule of The Law and the Spanish Constitution, yes? Who is going to jail for this? No one.
The constitution only matters when it matters to some.
What's being argued here is that seizing the .cat TLD when a page registered in it was hosting "unlawful" content consists in pure and simple censorship. It would be similar to the US government taking control of the .com TLD because some website hosted on a .com domain is selling drugs. This is censorship.
To quote the article (which apparently you didn't read) again:
> Whether it's allegations of sedition or any other form of unlawful or controversial speech, domain name intermediaries should not be held responsible for the content of websites that utilize their domains. If such content is unlawful, a court order directed to the publisher or host of that content is the appropriate way for authorities to deal with that illegality, rather than the blanket removal of entire domains from the Internet.
In addition, the web is now hosted in another domain, against the law, not because of "free speech", but because of using protected private information from citizens: https://onvotar.garantiespelreferendum.com/on-votar/index.ht...
This is not about "free speech", but about the sublevation of a regional government, against the rule of law, i.e. against citizen's rights.
This is a very dangerous precedent
And yes, I think that the CONTENT is ilegal and I would denunce it if my data is there, but the TLD has nothing to do with that
The content blocked is content being announced by an official entity (Generalitat) containing information about the unilateral organization of a referendum. The Generalitat as an official organism needs to abide by the existing constitutional laws. The judge as initial measure, has dictated to retrieve all official material with information regarding the organization of the referendum. No other pages from dotCAT have been seized, including unofficial ones with information about the referendum.
The EFF should also take into account that the Generalitat has unlawfully obtained private information from millions of citizens in order to be able to create a list of possible voters.
>Whether it's allegations of sedition or any other form of unlawful or controversial speech, domain name intermediaries should not be held responsible for the content of websites that utilize their domains. If such content is unlawful, a court order directed to the publisher or host of that content is the appropriate way for authorities to deal with that illegality, rather than the blanket removal of entire domains from the Internet.
https://elpais.com/elpais/2017/09/20/inenglish/1505917320_78...
I don't know if the EFF is aware that the site has citizen personal information without permission. Who protects us as citizens against rebel regional government putting online private information against the rule of law?
> Shortly the Government will release the details on the polling stations to be used for the 1st October Referendum.
Time to denunce to AEPD
To be fair, it is very difficult to find unbiased and knowledgeable people writing about this. It is best to not rely on only one kind of source if you want to form an opinion.
If the real intention was to organize a referendum, it could have been done with preparation, lawfully and negotiated with other regional political forces who are also supporting it.
It has been tried for years, not only in Catalonia, but also in Euskadi.
The Spanish law was changed en 2006 to make those referendums ilegal
That said, the law is just a tool used by the people to live peacefully in a society. If people are not happy about it, the law needs to be changed.
Note: This is what I read recently regarding this issue, but I am not a law expert, so take this with a grain of salt.
Edit: typos.
Please read this to know the facts: https://elpais.com/elpais/2017/09/20/inenglish/1505917320_78...
In European parlance, 'the government' often means the currently in-power group of legislative representatives, which causes much confusion in the US when we hear 'a new government was formed in X', or 'the government will be dissolved in Y'.
And by the way, this is a political problem that the Spanish government refuses to tackle politically, making it a criminal issue. Is it criminal to want to not belong to a country that thinks that promoting a referendum is a crime?
Also, El Pais is certainly not partisan, no...
[1]: http://www.elmundo.es/espana/2015/08/20/55d4cbb646163f3c1c8b...: The Spanish Constitutional Court has 12 members, of which 4 are chosen by the congress, 4 are chosen by the senate, 2 are chosen by the governing party, and 2 by the "Consejo General del Poder Judicial".
Is simply put, bulshit. A court ordered taking down illegal calls to a referendum not approved by a democratic consitution. If that was ignored, someone had to take action.
What orders ignored? Do you have any link to newspapers?
And, by the way, PuntCAT is a TLD register, they don't host any site.
Do you know other case where the TLD registar has been seized? Domains are blocked via ISP's, the publisher or the hosting.
Of course, Spain is also calling thoroughly pacific demonstrations “tumultuous” so that they can accuse politicians of sedition, so Spain clearly doesn’t care about truth and law.
Is the law is wrong? Maybe, in fact I might agree with the right to vote secession, but (IMHO) this needs to be done with great care, if not, any region of any state can call a vote for independence each time they disagree with the neighbors. In fact this kind of "blackmail" has been used consistently in Catalonia for years: "If you don't vote this bill, we will secede from Spain".
So, I don't think that the law that prohibit referendums for secession is completely nonsense. Exceptions of course can be made, but, is the case of Catalonia an exception? Before answer that, please, think if you have all the data to make that statement.
That blackmail has not used never. If you think so, provide just one example.
If you ask me, I think that was a political (dirty) movement to gain some votes. But the point here is that since some Catalans didn't like the court resolution, they started this "blackmail": "either you accept the estatut or we will secede". We are now at the threat of secession.
Note that the quoted texts are not literal phrases said by anyone, it is just to clarify my point.
You asked one example, here is one. There are many other examples of laws passed in the Spanish congress with the support of Catalan parties in exchange of political favors.
> ... .cat domains not connected with the October 1 referendum (including eff.cat, EFF's little-known Catalan language website) have not been affected.
A more accurate title might have been "Individual .cat domains promoting sedition casualties in...", which is not what it currently seems like it means.
https://mobile.twitter.com/JulianAssange/status/911226994846...
https://mobile.twitter.com/Snowden/status/910888878948700160
- judge told .cat TLD to take over some domains, setting them to display a spanish police landing page.
- .cat complied.
- Judge told .cat TLD to censor any domain that does support the referendum in any way.
- .cat replied that they run a TLD, that it's not their job to act as a censorship agency, inspecting each domain and disabling those that host websites that talk about topics that a judge specified are forbidden.
- .cat notified the ICANN of the situation they're in: https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/correspondence/lineros...
- police raided the TLD office, and arrested its CTO at his home.