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August 6, 2005
You May Not Mail Horror Comics to Great Britain!
To Germany, you may not mail "playing cards, except in complete decks properly wrapped."
To friends or family in Albania, you can't mail "extravagant clothes and other articles contrary to Albanians' taste."
Guatemalans must sneeze easily; they've banned powder of all kinds.
If you're thinking of mailing a police whistle to someone in Nicaragua, you can forget it. (Communist literature is out, too. Take that, Daniel Ortega.)
Nothing in Arabic to Niger, please, and nothing with the Red Cross trademark, either.
If your great-uncle in Lima needs some shoe wax or a wooden spoon, he won't be getting them by mail. (No playing cards, either. Must be the German influence.)
Sierra Leone doesn't want your Japanese brushes, unless they're nylon toothbrushes. (Tanzania has had it with the Japanese shaving brushes, by the way. Uganda too.)
If it rains, it pours ... but not in a package to Syria.
Nearby, in Israel, they need no imported sand (they have plenty of their own, I guess), but so long as that beehive you've got is new and not used, you can send it along.
Coals to Newcastle are apparently rather like cloves to Nepal.
You can't send invisible ink to Vietnam, by the way, but that one's tough to enforce.
No honey to Trinidad and Tobago, please. (The bee lobby must be particularly strong there.)
If you're wooing a Malawian, you'll have to rely on your own charms. No aphrodisiacs.
Don't even think of sending an oboe to Iran, especially if it's wrapped in a fashion newspaper.
Latvia will have none of your live animals, thank you very much, unless they are leeches.
Leeches, on the other hand, are right out in Italy. In fact, just about everything is. Especially bells, mounted coral, and typewriter ribbon.
Got it?
Posted by Eric at August 6, 2005 11:27 AM
Comments
What is odd is that the USPS, FedEX, etc. all list the Horror Comic prohibition, but the Royal Mail doesn't
The restriction was enacted as the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955. In the past 50 years, there has been 1 (one) prosecution brought under the act; there have been 0 (zero) convictions.
Given that British authors basically own the market for Horror Comics (Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, etc), and given that any prosecution would require personal approval by the AG, and that judicial review would then almost certainly void the statute under the Human Rights bill), I wouldn't worry about this one too much.
It's just like the prohibition on the import of indecent material. The actual standard that customs officers are required to use is that of obscenity, but once he or she has made such a judgement, the structure of the laws place the burden on defendant to prove the material was not obscene.
Posted by: Simon Spero at August 6, 2005 2:15 PM
Interesting list.
New Zealand lists "Meat or meat products and fish and fish products are admitted only conditionally." And if that meat product happens to be from sheep (a very large industry in NZ), you can pretty much forget it. A company I used to work at had great difficulties with NZ customs because one product had antibodies derived from sheep. I don't know if these problems were ever solved before that product was dropped from production (for entirely unrelated reasons).
Posted by: Ken Summers at August 8, 2005 4:47 PM
Reminds me of the old joke...
In Heaven:
the cooks are French,
the policemen are English,
the mechanics are German,
the lovers are Italian
and the bankers are Swiss.
In Hell:
the cooks are English,
the policemen are German,
the mechanics are French,
the lovers are Swiss
and the bankers are Italian.
Posted by: K at August 9, 2005 5:54 PM