A continent where laws capable of sending you to prison for freely expressing certain opinions is your counter example to a lack of certain advanced individual rights in the U.S.
A country where the highest court in the land can rule that if you are convicted and sentenced to death, but are factually innocent, that the courts have no obligation to reverse your conviction, and that if you want off death row, you should appeal to the governor. And if the governor says no, well, sucks to be you, you're getting executed anyway.
Many examples abound. Don't be lazy and do a google search. Granted, many of those opinions that create grounds for legal sanction in the EU are disagreeable ones, but that's how freedom of expression as a real right works, it applies to the shit you don't like or want to hear, not just socially condoned opinions.
Multiple EU countries in the Union as well as the statutes of the EU itself condemn and prohibit a wide range of speech under the grounds of offensiveness. This includes hate speech laws with very broadly defined wording, laws against holocaust denial and laws against speech that is offensive to certain identifiable groups. Misinformation laws are also being formulated. However much you might think that many of the above forms of expression are repulsive (I'd likely agree with you on much of that repulsion by the way), such laws can easily be contorted to include all sorts of censorship. Aside from the censorship, free expression really should absolutely also include legally protected free expression in a public context to espouse views that are repulsive and intolerant too.
Not OP of that particular statement, but in Germany you can get imprisoned for denying that holocaust has happened.
However, I would question whether denying historical facts is an opinion. There seem to be fewer cases of people demanding that the holocaust should be resumed. That I would call an opinion. I assume that it would lead to prison if repeated often enough, albeit based on a different law. Still, I am more willing to travel to such country than to a country requesting my passwords at the border. Call it illogical or not, it's my preference.
> However, I would question whether denying historical facts is an opinion.
Historical facs have a tendency to change based on the current political climate. Which is to say, they are always more like opinions.
Although a better example would be insulting a police officer or politician, which can include as bening things as making fun of them on twitter. Granted, this is more a concern for citizens than it is for tourists so I agree with your assessment that the US border controls are a bigger threat to you as a traveller.
Didn't a former Greek finance minister recently get banned from Germany for political reasons? In France it is illegal to deny the holocaust but legal to deny the Armenian genocide.
One noteworthy example of how absurdly politicized these kinds of speech restriction laws can be. Was the mass slaughter of up to 1.5 million Armenian men, women and even little children and babies somehow qualitatively less grotesque? Or perhaps the speech law itself is a muddled, politically oriented idiocy.
