Hungarian Omelette
From the desk of The Brussels Journal on Thu, 2008-07-10 15:03
A quote from the Political Pest blog, 10 July 2008
[T]wo interesting and potentially far-reaching court decisions were handed down on Tuesday regarding political speech in Hungary. In the first, the European Court of Human Rights [in Strassbourg] struck down a law banning the communist-style red star, which Hungary enacted back in 1994. Meanwhile, that same day a local court in Budapest ruled that egg-throwing is a form of protected political speech, provided people cut it out if the cops tell them to. […] [T]he Strasbourg decision does not apply to the swastika or the arrow cross, the display of which are still rigidly controlled by the original law against "symbols of tyranny." So just to quickly connect the dots here, it's now legal to pelt people you hate with eggs, but not to show them a picture that might hurt their feelings. Obviously the next important theory the country's constitutional eggheads need to work over is whether it's legal to paint a picture of a swastika or arrow cross on an egg and then throw it at someone…