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April 18, 2007
As Europe Sinks
From a Corner post today by Andrew Stuttaford
Never comfortable with free speech, and increasingly comfortable with reviving the old blasphemy laws, the EU, it seems, is up to its old tricks again. The EU Observer has some of the details:
After six years of heated political debate, EU member states are set to agree on a common anti-racism law, under which offenders will face up to three years in jail for stirring-up racial hatred or denying acts of genocide, such as the Holocaust. One diplomat in Brussels confirmed to EU Observer that the controversial piece of law is in its final-tuning phase and is likely to gain EU blessing at a justice and interior ministers meeting in Luxembourg on Thursday (19 April). The latest draft – cited by the Reuters news agency — foresees an EU-wide jail sentence of at least one to three years for "publicly inciting to violence or hatred, directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin."Danish cartoonists, beware.
The same rules would also apply to people "publicly condoning, denying, or grossly trivialising crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes" as defined by international crime courts. According to the Financial Times, such wording has been carefully chosen to only include denial of the Holocaust during the second world war, as well as the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, but would not criminalise denying mass killings of Armenians during the Ottoman empire in 1915, something that Turkey strongly opposes labelling as genocide.
Armenians will, doubtless, have to say something about that, and as for the Eastern Europeans, well....
Poland and the Baltic countries...continue to hold on to their demand that "crimes under the Stalin regime in the former Soviet Union" become part of the bill's scope. "We believe Stalinist acts of genocide should be condemned in this document. It would put them on an equal footing with Nazi crimes in an international forum," an Estonian diplomat was cited as saying by the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita.
Holocaust denial is idiotic, it's cruel, and it's malign, but it should not be illegal. If it is to be illegal, however, there can be no possible excuse for banning denial of that slaughter whilst permitting denial of Stalinist genocide (such as that in the Ukraine in the early 1930s, for example), the butchering of the Armenians, or for that matter, some of the other great horrors that litter human history.
Posted by Tom at April 18, 2007 10:06 PM
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Comments
Any guess as to how many non-Muslims end up in jail for this "crime"?
Posted by: DagneyT at April 20, 2007 6:50 PM
