The act criminalizes utterances deemed to be “aggravated by prejudice” against any protected identity group (including race, religion, or transgender status) with up to seven years in prison. How exactly any of this is defined is not clear. Private speech, even within privates home, is not protected. Indeed, Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf has argued that it absolutely “must be prosecuted.” A child’s report to a teacher of what a parent said at home will be sufficient. The Act specifies that it is immaterial “whether or not there is a specific victim of the offence,” and that “evidence from a single source is sufficient to prove that an offence is aggravated by prejudice.” In fact, “stirring up hatred” is now a criminal offense in Scotland – exactly the same all-purpose legal term so often put to use to punish dissent in the People’s Republic of China, including as the offense under which many of those pesky Hong Kong pro-democracy protestors were convicted.
I should emphasize I don't know how reliable this source is, or if the bill was substantially altered before it became law. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-56364... states some changes have been made, but is very vague in describing them. The criminalization of speech within private homes remained:
Yet even with that scrutiny, concerns remain. Offences can now be committed even in private, an abandonment of an earlier "dwelling defence" in race hate law.
No offence to you or anyone else in this thread but why not just look up the law? Scotland is an English-speaking country and their laws are public. I saw a similar thing with the protests in Canada here on HN. Multiple people speculating as to the contents of the Emergencies Act there, often incorrectly.
Is it difficult to find without specialist knowledge? I took some law in university and maybe that's why?
> Is it difficult to find without specialist knowledge?
It's not _easy_ to find but I don't think that's the problem.
There are a few problem that expertise probably solves.
There are often exceptions throughout such laws so it's less simple to say what the law covers than it is to give an example and test if the law covers it.
There is often a lot of seemingly subjective legalese in law that is actually an objective term. Like, "may", "can", "should" that has to be understood.
Then there is language that is actually subjective that laypeople often get wrong because they push those words to extremes to create an absurd example. It's unclear to a lot of people if it's legally okay to do that. Most of the time, that's what a judge is for and that's why different judges give different interpretations. Lay people have a hard time defining the edges off "(practically) all judges would interpret this way" and "(practically) no judges would interpret that way".
The linked article is intentionally misleading. Why would anyone take seriously the idea that the courts in Scotland regard "stirring up hatred" as the same thing as the courts in China? If that is the standard for criticism for every law in the west then throw the baby our with the bathwater, it is all useless. Why waste one's time with this disingenuous claptrap?
The piece breathlessly describes the West as literally Stalinism. Is anyone being arrested in the middle of the night on trumped up charges? Or are democracies passing laws making it harder for bigots to openly be bigots, and giving them due process when they break the law?
Nobody claimed democracies will pass laws you have to like, it turns out bigotry is wildly unpopular and hard to defend, so without a First Amendment, free speech tends to become circumscribed. Democracies can pass awful laws, yes. But what is the breathless author presenting as an alternative?
Edit: and here come the downvotes by people who believe I’m committing wrongthink by pointing out its mostly bigotry being targeted.
> Nobody claimed democracies will pass laws you have to like, it turns out bigotry is wildly unpopular and hard to defend, so without a First Amendment, free speech tends to become circumscribed. Democracies can pass awful laws, yes. But what is the breathless author presenting as an alternative?
You said it in the first sentence quoted: a First Amendment.
In this case, of course, a Fourth Amendment and a Fifth Amendment also help a great deal.
This may be pedantic, but the author did not present the First Amendment as an alternative, and in fact excoriated America as an authoritarian state no better than China.
China has a first amendment very similar to America’s. However, they don’t have rule of law or an independent judiciary so its constitution is less meaningful than the USA’s.
What's happening is the average person's quality of legal life is falling. Most people are not terrorists, they are spied on as such. Most people are not abusive partners, they are taught wild sex ed. Most people are not racists, the nanny state is handling us as such.
Your mistake was falling for the virtue signalling and forgetting it's about state control. And yes, Scotland wants to put people in jail for saying words out loud (trumped up charges) purely out of hearsay (stalinism).
> it turns out bigotry is wildly unpopular and hard to defend, so without a First Amendment, free speech tends to become circumscribed.
So is being a jerk. Want to criminalize it? Oh, and I get to define what 'jerk' means, and against which groups acting as one is not allowed. We'll call them 'protected groups', for brevity.
The history of laws passing in democracies is largely that of jerks getting told they can't do some jerky thing anymore. A semi-recent example would be sexual harassment. It used to just be considered normal, then it became kind of a "jerk" behavior, but has since become criminal. Norms evolve.
Last week on hacker news we had a headline stating young people are having less sex than ever. And people were right, a lot of youngsters are afraid of all the overblown drama. Is kissing sexual harassment? Sexting? Having sex without written consent?
Non-trivial jerky behavior is completely contextual on a per community basis, and a government could not and should not act on that. Out of scope.
Your hypothesis is it’s because of government regulations. I doubt it. It probably has a lot more to do with the smart device in their pocket. Sex is a form of entertainment and all forms of entertainment are struggling for our attention. Also services like OnlyFans are encouraging women to monetize their sexuality and young men tend to be cash poor. That’s my hypothesis anyway.
The act criminalizes utterances deemed to be “aggravated by prejudice” against any protected identity group (including race, religion, or transgender status) with up to seven years in prison. How exactly any of this is defined is not clear. Private speech, even within privates home, is not protected. Indeed, Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf has argued that it absolutely “must be prosecuted.” A child’s report to a teacher of what a parent said at home will be sufficient. The Act specifies that it is immaterial “whether or not there is a specific victim of the offence,” and that “evidence from a single source is sufficient to prove that an offence is aggravated by prejudice.” In fact, “stirring up hatred” is now a criminal offense in Scotland – exactly the same all-purpose legal term so often put to use to punish dissent in the People’s Republic of China, including as the offense under which many of those pesky Hong Kong pro-democracy protestors were convicted.
I should emphasize I don't know how reliable this source is, or if the bill was substantially altered before it became law. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-56364... states some changes have been made, but is very vague in describing them. The criminalization of speech within private homes remained:
Yet even with that scrutiny, concerns remain. Offences can now be committed even in private, an abandonment of an earlier "dwelling defence" in race hate law.