March 2022. A regulation. A list of five names.
RT. Sputnik. Their subsidiaries. That was the entire annex.
Every legal justification offered at the time was source-specific. A named broadcaster, a named state, a named information campaign. The regulation did not claim to establish a general power. It claimed to solve a particular problem.
The court ruled on who was allowed to speak.
Lists Grow
Not through public debate each time. Through amendment. A council adds a name; an annex gets longer; the underlying regulation never has to pass through the front door again, because the door was already built the first time.
This is not unique to Brussels, and it is not new. Export control lists grow. Terrorism designation lists grow. Sanctions lists, everywhere they have ever existed, have only ever moved in one direction. Removal is rare enough to make the news. Addition is routine enough not to.
The mechanism the CJEU confirmed this month was never really about RT. RT was simply the name on the list when the test case arrived. The ruling is about what happens to anyone, however small, however unpaid, however many years after the fact — the moment something they touched is on the list.
What Changes When a Source Moves Onto It
Here is the detail worth sitting with.
The three defendants in Saarbrücken did not change what they published. Videos went up between April 2022 and August 2023, on a private site, funded by donations, read by an unknown but small number of people. Nothing about the content changed between the day it was posted and the day the prosecution began.
What changed was the classification of the source.
Under this reading, legality did not depend on what was said, who said it, or who heard it. It depended entirely on a list maintained elsewhere, subject to revision at any time, applied retroactively to material already published under the law as it stood on the day it went up.
A person publishing today has no way of knowing whether the source they are quoting, citing, or embedding will still be an acceptable source in eighteen months. The list is the law. The list can change. The publication cannot be un-published.
The Reader Did Not Move
The self-image of the postwar West — the one built across the 1960s and 70s, the one held up against the censorship regimes on the other side of a wall that no longer exists — rested on a specific claim: that speech here was free because it did not depend on who was speaking, only on what was said.
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That claim was never fully true. It was, for a long stretch, true enough to be believable.
A few people said otherwise at the time, and said it in the only genre that was allowed to say it. A number instead of a name, in a village nobody could leave. A resignation nobody was permitted to complete. Filed under fiction. Filed under paranoia. Filed under: not to be taken literally.
The question this ruling puts on the table is not whether RT should have been banned. Governments have always drawn lines around wartime propaganda; that is not new, and Maier Files takes no position on where that particular line belongs.
The question is narrower and colder: once a legal system builds a mechanism where liability attaches to a name on a list rather than to the content of the speech, what stops the list from being the only thing that matters, for anyone, about anything, eventually?
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Nobody has to break into your house to make yesterday’s citation into tomorrow’s offense. They only have to update a list you were never shown, for reasons you were never given, and wait for you to become the number.
Be seeing you.
The village had no name. Patrick McGoohan built it in 1967 and never fully explained it either.
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Independent research doesn’t get to choose which list it’s on.
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Related reading → A Court Ruled on Who Is Allowed to Speak
