In which European countries is illegal to publicly state an opinion that in the US would be protected by the first amendment? I often heard that the US are somehow exceptional in the freedom of speech that they provide to their citizens via the first amendment. However, I never saw an actual comparison with, say, European countries. My question is: In which European country, is it illegal (for a citizen of that European country) to publicly state an opinion that in the US would be protected the first amendment? Is there somewhere a list with such comparison?
Almost every European nation has a &quot;hate speech&quot; law that makes the use of offensive bigoted words of phrases illegal. The U.S. does not have any such laws, and the First Amendment makes such laws unconstitutional. The closest the U.S. can get are laws criminalizing &quot;Hate Crimes&quot; which are ordinary crimes which were motivated in part or in whole by the victim's actual or perceived protected class status. Other specific examples as mentioned in comments, are that Germany has strict laws about advocacy of Nazi ideology. This is completely legal in the United States. Nazi ideology is not popular in the U.S. by any means, but it's allowed to be advocated for because of the strong Freedom of Speech Laws in the United States. In other regards, while U.S. Law is fairly similar to U.K. Law (you have to get into weeds about the differences), it is way more difficult to sue for defamation in U.S. than in the U.K. For starters, the U.S. has the &quot;Public Person&quot; rule which requires that any defamation about a person who is largely known to the public (politicians and celebrities largely) must prove Actual Malice Or Reckless Disregard for the Truth (I.E. You didn't even do the basic research into the statement) in order to prove defamation. But there's also the matter of the burden of proof. In the U.K. the speaker of the alleged defamation must prove in court that the statement was not defamatory. In the U.S., all legal challenges to are &quot;protected speech&quot; until proven otherwise in a court of law. This means that even with the &quot;Public Person&quot; rule set aside, the statement's original speaker need not prove that their speech is truthful, and the burden's on the accuser of defamation to prove it. Edit: Additional Info based on comments, but &quot;Protected Speech&quot; is a legal term used in the U.S. that defines speech that is protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States as opposed to commercial speech, which is speech used to make advertise or to further commerce and is restricted, and unprotected speech, which is speech that can land one in trouble. While the list of types of speech is long, every form of speech restriction is very very narrowly tailored. &quot;Hate Speech&quot;, which would be the utterance of words or phrases that can be offensive to people of a protected class (a characteristic that is beyond the individuals control). &quot;Hate Crimes&quot; are not necessarily spoken during the commission of the crime, but rather can be charged in addition to the crime. Suppose a serial killer was killing people of a certain race, this is not enough for police to go on because most serial killers target victims that meet a physical description (same skin color, same hair color, same gender). Once the killer is captured, police search his apartment and find a manifesto where the killer admits that he is selecting his target because he believes people of this protected class are subhuman and thus his superior nature gives him the right to kill them, this would show that the killings were motivated out of hatred, and thus qualify as a hate crime. The way he phrases this may be purely academic and use in offensive language OR it could be laden with all manner of crass slurs. It doesn't matter... what he said is protected speech but what he did is... well... to quote Guardians of the Galaxy... is &quot;murder... on of the worst crimes of all. So also illegal.&quot; Hate crimes criminalize crimes that are motivated by hatred... they do not criminalize speech that is hateful.
Sure: No Constitutional rights are totally unencumbered. Even natural rights like the "right to life" are legally "infringed" through various theories (e.g., self-defense, capital punishment, warfare). The Second Amendment has been interpreted as a right to keep and bear weapons that would reasonably be used in self-defense or in military service. You don't have to go to strategic weapons like nukes to find "reasonable infringement" of that right. For example, even though the military and even police routinely use explosives, individuals are absolutely subject to the whims of a federal regulatory agency (the BATFE) as well as state restrictions if they want to keep and bear detonators. Also, I'm not aware of an absolute prohibition on the possession of nuclear devices by non-government entities. E.g., various government regulators oversee private entities that operate commercial and research nuclear reactors and other activities that put them all-but in possession of nuclear arms. If an individual really wanted to legally keep and bear a nuclear weapon it could probably be done with enough money and oversight. (Amendment: Except, as cpast points out in the comments, that there is a law against private possession of nuclear weapons in the U.S. Which just goes back to the broad answer to your general question: In practice there are no unencumbered rights. Constitutional "rights" might better be called things that require "strict scrutiny" and "narrow tailoring" of government infringement.)
germany In Germany, taking pictures - and publishing them - is legal, if they're taken from public areas, from the general perspective of a passer-by, and if the picture doesn't make individual persons recognizable. (There are some restrictions about making persons recognizable; if you take a picture of a monument or other building that would typically be photographed by tourists, and if the topic of the picture is clearly the monument, not a random bystander, then it's OK to publish even if the bystander's face is visible. But that doesn't work for individual's houses). Still, Street View got into trouble because their cameras are mounted on roofs of a car, in a height of 2.5-3 meters, so they violated the &quot;perspective of a passer-by&quot; rule. To return to the example of &quot;bathroom&quot;, the camera could well be able to see you nude when a passer-by would only be able to see a small portion of the ceiling next to the window. Because of this, and because many Germans were uneasy with seeing their houses on the internet, as a condition to permit Street View at all, the German government insisted on allowing people to request their house to be removed; in 2010, approximately 250000 people made use of that (source: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-11595495). Because of the high resistance against Street View in Germany, Google published what they had in 2011, but stopped collecting more images. This is explained in https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/germany-street-view/, which also explains some of the reasons why Germans are so heavily biased for privacy.
There are venue restrictions where political speech is restricted, such as on military bases; content restrictions (transmitting classified information to the world); you cannot defraud by saying false things in order to get something, you cannot defame a person, you cannot speak obscenely (though it's hard to tell what counts as "obscenity"). You cannot appropriate other people's property in speaking (i.e. copyright law is a restriction on speech). The type of speech restrictions seem to pertain to speech and violence caused by such speech. A classic limitation is that you cannot speak "fighting words" (Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire 315 U.S. 568), which in 1942 meant calling someone a "damned racketeer" and "damned Fascist", which the court characterized as "inherently likely to provoke a violent reaction". The court subsequently refined its position on "provocative" speech. In Virginia v. Black 538 U.S. 343 a law against cross-burning was found to run afoul of the First Amendment as a restriction on political expression, but it would be fully consistent with The Constitution to outlaw "cross burning carried out with the intent to intimidate". This states may "prohibit only those forms of intimidation that are most likely to inspire fear of bodily harm". The current position is that you cannot incite to the imminent use of force. In Brandenburg v. Ohio 395 U.S. 444, the court stated that the First Amendment does not "permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action". There are myriad laws against threats, for instance in Washington you may not "knowingly threaten(s) to cause bodily injury immediately or in the future to the person threatened or to any other person", and you can't do that ("knowingly cause another to believe that the offender will cause serious physical harm to the person or property of the other person") in Ohio either. You can't get away with threatening "to commit a crime which will result in death or great bodily injury to another person" in California. This class of restrictions on speech seems to be quite robust. You may not induce panic in Ohio, e.g. shout "fire" in a theater -- I don't know if any other state has such a law.
The government is prohibited by the first amendment from creating a law which gives preference to one religion over another. Banning entry to persons of one or more religions would do this.
There are lots of times when it's illegal to lie. Among them: impersonating a federal agent (18 USC 912) lying to a federal agent (18 USC 1001); health care fraud (18 USC 1035 and 1347); mail fraud (18 USC 1341); wire fraud (18 USC 1343); perjury (18 USC 1623); False Claims Act (31 USC 3729-33); and libel and slander (common law). But you're right that these laws are all at least theoretically in conflict with the First Amendment rule that &quot;Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech.&quot; So why are some of them upheld against a First Amendment challenge while others are struck down? The Supreme Court explained its rationale a few years ago in U.S. v. Alvarez, 567 U.S. 709 (2012). That case dealt with a federal statute making it illegal to falsely claim that you had won any medal that Congress had authorized to be awarded to the armed forces. The federal government said that false speech had no value and therefore was not protected, pointing to cases upholding laws like the ones listed above where the Court had used similar descriptions. But the Court rejected that argument, noting that the cases where it has upheld laws limiting false speech dealt with &quot;defamation, fraud, or some other legally cognizable harm associated with a false statement&quot;: In those decisions the falsity of the speech at issue was not irrelevant to our analysis, but neither was it determinative. The Court has never endorsed the categorical rule the Government advances: that false statements receive no First Amendment protection. Our prior decisions have not confronted a measure, like the Stolen Valor Act, that targets falsity and nothing more. Even when considering some instances of defamation and fraud, moreover, the Court has been careful to instruct that falsity alone may not suffice to bring the speech outside the First Amendment. The statement must be a knowing or reckless falsehood. So that sort of gives you an organizing principle. It's not really a philosophical distinction, and meeting it doesn't mean that the lie is illegal, just that it may be outlawed. tl;dr: The First Amendment usually does not protect false statements when they are: made knowingly; and made with some corrupt purpose.
Almost certainly, there is no such right. It's illegal under 18 USC 831 to possess "nuclear material" without specific authorization. 18 USC 832 forbids the possession of a "radiological weapon". If there is intent to use the device to cause death, serious bodily injury, or damage to property or the environment, that's also a violation of 18 USC 2332i. I don't think these laws have been explicitly tested against the Second Amendment, but related cases suggest they would hold up (if the challenge wasn't simply dismissed as frivolous). The Second Amendment doesn't grant a blanket right to own weapons. Federal law, 18 USC 922 (o) makes it unlawful to own a "machinegun" (as defined in the statute), and in the case of Hollis v. Lynch, the Fifth Circuit held that this law was constitutional, because, as they said, the Second Amendment only protects weapons that are in "common use [...] for lawful purposes like self-defense." This case doesn't seem to have been appealed further, but the reasoning cited by the Fifth Circuit comes from the Supreme Court's opinion in D.C. v. Heller. If machineguns aren't in "common use", and therefore not protected, surely the same would apply to nuclear weapons.
Your VPN scenario is why you have to show the banner to everyone. If you somehow knew beyond any doubt that someone was not in the EU, then you would not have to show a banner, but because you can't verify that, you should always show the banner. Doing so also protects against accidentally violating a similar law in another country; the GDPR is the best-known privacy law, but it is far from the only one. It's good practice to ask for people's permission before collecting their information anyway.