The European Parliament has taken unprecedented steps to censor the record of what politicians say if they think it is racist or any other variant of hate speech.
Authorities in the body have developed measures to cut live-streamed video of speakers who they say cross the line.
They will also be able to delete video and audio from permanent records of exchanges in the chamber – making them inaccessible to the public.
Campaigners and MEPs have criticised the EU – often seen as self-righteous and overbearing – for trampling the free speech of its only directly elected politicians.
Gerolf Annemans, a Belgian MEP, said the rule: “can be abused by those who have hysterical reactions to things that they qualify as racist, xenophobic, when people are just expressing politically incorrect views.”
As with most modern parliaments, proceedings in the European Parliament are live-streamed to the public, and are available to watch online after the event.
However, according to the Associated Press, under the new rules officials will be able to hit a “kill switch” to stop the broadcast in its tracks if a parliamentarian oversteps the mark.
There are also procedures to access the permanent record of proceedings and delete allegedly unsuitable portions from there.
Parliament officials did not publicly announce the new measures, known as Rule 165, instead waiting for it to be revealed by a Spanish newspaper.
The text of the rule allows the chairman of any given debate to censor the record “in the case of defamatory, racist or xenophobic language or behavior by a member”.
Chairmen would apparently be left to judge these criteria themselves. As well as having their words erased, offenders could also be fined €9,000 ($9,500).
It is usual enough for legislatures to have rules about what is acceptable – for example MPs in the UK can be censured for directly insulting each other, and even suspended from debates.
Likewise in the US Congress, as Senator Elizabeth Warren recently discovered.
But even in those circumstances, the chambers do not try to edit the record to remove any proof that the violation even happened, which is what the EU seems to want here.