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Mr. Sohmen:
the movies on Monday.
Sir, I must confess I didn't go to
I oppose the motion introduced by
Mr. Martin Lee but I do so with some reluctance.
I am
Mr.
uneasy about censorship for political motives since the judgements which have to be made by the censor are more difficult and more prone to abuse than, for example, restraints imposed on the freedom of expression for moral reasons. History is full of examples of political censorship leading at best to the suppression of unorthodox ideas and at worst to persecution, torture or death. Pressures to conform have not and never will stimulate progress nor increase happiness. In retrospect mankind has always discovered that such measures have produced the very opposite effects. We should also not forget that censorship is an administrative device but not, at least in the first instance, a subject for adjudication by independent tribunals. Martin Lee must be given credit for highlighting the problems inherent in this issue, and I must frankly confess that if this was totally new legislation we were considering rather than a question of legitimising, as an interim measure, a practice that has been going on for some time, I would in all likelihood vote against the introduction of such new provisions. I am not, of course, saying that Mr. Martin Lee's
He has approached the arguments are correct or fully valid. issue in too legalistic a fashion, in that he has only focussed on the format and not on the substance of what need to be the limits of permissible censorship for the reasons contained in
Mr. Lee's reference to the Regulation 3A (7).
possibility of Regulation 3A (7) not being capable of being brought within the exemptions provided in article 19, 3, paragraph B of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights only deals with the question of whether the censorship authority can be seen to be meeting the covenant's definitions of being necessary for the protection of national security of public order.
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