This is not a good thing. Raiding a plane, arresting, and then extraditing someone on the basis of online expressions of view (now 3 years old) is an unfortunate picture of the future.
That his views were reprehensible, wrong and stupid is beside the point. Some European countries have laws against Holocaust denial, and paradoxically, laws against the expression of certain points of view do not protect free speech, they endanger it. The argument goes if only there was "more" limits to free speech, then the Nazis could not have come to power and the Holocaust would have never happened.
The Nazis did not need to suppress free speech, because when they were elected, they inherited a whole bunch of laws that the previous (Weimar republic) government had passed in relation to restraining free speech:
"The uncomfortable fact is that the Nazis didn’t invent the apparatus of power or culture of repression in Germany, they merely took control of, and perfected, an apparatus and culture that had already been created and used by “liberals” to combat extremism."The fact that Mr Toben can be extradited from the UK to Germany under an EU arrest warrant should concern everyone. Today it is Holocaust denial; tomorrow, it could be "insulting religion" or "denying the Space Monkey", or "quoting an imam".
Free speech is perhaps the most important right we have inherited. The idea that that a transnational body can make and enforce speech codes is a grave concern to anyone that has ever expressed a point of view.
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