By Ethan Huff

Europeans are about to lose their free speech rights after the European Union’s (EU) European Commission (EC) signaled that “hate speech” will probably be included among the most serious criminal offences across the bloc.

With the EU elections just weeks away, the powers that be in Europe are scrambling to eliminate Europeans’ right to free speech under the guise of stopping “hate” throughout the land.

The European Citizens’ Panel on Tackling Hatred in Society (ECP) is one of several panels that EC President Ursula von der Leyen created to crack down on free speech, this being a major plank of her campaign, even though European voters do not pick the EC president—he or she is appointed by the globalists, it turns out. Even so, von der Leyen is talking a big game about implementing a whole new “democracy” across Europe that is “fit for the future.” In her mind, this means silencing people whose speech upsets special interest groups who hate them for it.

“That could mean anything, and the vagueness by no means stops there: the very ‘hate speech,’ despite the gravity of the proposals to classify it as a serious crime, is not even well-defined, observers are warning,” warns Reclaim the Net’s Didi Rankovic. “Despite that, the recommendations contained in a report produced by the panel have been backed by EC’s Vice-President for Values and Transparency, Vera Jourova, as well as Vice President for Democracy and Demography, Dubravka Suica.”

Hate speech isn’t real

Jourova says the panel’s recommendations for how to deal with “hate speech” are “clear and ambitious.” The problem is, that “hate speech” itself remains undefined, likely on purpose, to draw the net on anyone who says anything that “offends” someone from a special interest group. Imagine a society in which saying that there are only two genders, male and female, is considered to be a form of “hate.” This type of thing is already happening in Canada, and now, von der Leyen wants it for Europe, too.

The report describes “hate speech” as any form of speech that is “incompatible with the values of human dignity, freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and respect of human rights.” In other words, defining “hate speech” is arbitrary based on each individual’s values. Europe is currently freer than Canada on the “hate speech” front, more closely aligning with the United States and its Constitutional First Amendment, which enshrines the individual’s right to freedom of speech. Von der Leyen and her fellow cronies want to change that as soon as possible.

It turns out that there are already “hate speech” laws in the EU that capture very specific things. Von der Leyen and other globalist-selected EU leaders say they want to expand those laws to “ensure that all forms of hate speech are uniformly recognized and penalized, reinforcing our commitment to a more inclusive and respectful society.” If the changes stick, so-called “marginalized communities” across Europe will be afforded extra protections to “uphold human dignity,” whatever that means.

Media reports indicate that this newfound effort to stamp out “hate speech” is coordinated in that the recommendation “adopts exactly the same terminology as an EC proposal that was recently endorsed by the European Parliament to extend the list of EU-wide crimes to include ‘hate speech.’”

Originally published at naturalnews.com