International Herald Tribune, France
Jan 11 2007

Berlin seeks to bar Holocaust denial in EU

By Dan Bilefsky Published: January 12, 2007

BERLIN: Germany wants to use its European Union presidency to push
through legislation that would make denying the Holocaust punishable
by stiff jail sentences in all 27 EU member states.

The country’s justice minister, Brigitte Zypries, said Thursday night
that Germany’s commitment to combating racism and xenophobia – and
keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive – was both an enduring
historical obligation and a present-day political necessity.

"We have always said that it can’t be the case that it should still
be acceptable in Europe to say the Holocaust never existed and that
six million Jews were never killed," she said. Under the German
proposal, she said, those who deny the Nazi slaughter of Jews during
World War II could face up to three years in prison.

Zypries said the proposal, which will be debated by the bloc’s
justice ministers in the next six months, would also seek to
criminalize racist declarations that are an incitement to violence
against a specific person or group. The aim, she said, was to
harmonize national legal systems in their approach to combating
racism and xenophobia.

Unifying hate crime rules in countries with vastly different legal
cultures could prove difficult, analysts said. European leaders have
been unanimous in condemning those who deny the Holocaust, and have
sharply criticized the Iranian government for sponsoring a recent
conference that cast doubt on it.

But the question of whether to criminalize such acts has divided
Europe between countries like Germany that view a common EU law as a
moral imperative and other countries, like Britain, Italy and
Denmark, that have resisted common rules as infringing on free speech
and civil liberties.

Two years ago, Luxembourg tried to use its EU presidency to push
through legislation to unify legal standards for Holocaust denial,
but was blocked by Italy on the grounds that the legislation breached
freedom of speech. At the time, several countries rejected attempts
to ban Nazi symbols, which gained force after the release of photos
of Prince Harry of Britain wearing a swastika armband at a costume
party.

Zypries said she was confident Germany could now succeed in
overcoming such resistance since Italy, under a left- of-center prime
minister, Romano Prodi, had dropped its opposition. But she cautioned
that the legislation would need to be sufficiently narrow in scope if
it were to gain support.

The Luxembourg proposal, which Germany is studying with a view toward
emulating it, states that racist declarations or Holocaust denial
will not be prosecuted if they are expressed in a way that does not
incite hatred against an individual or group of people.

Laws against denying the Holocaust already exist in Austria, Belgium,
France, Germany and Spain. In a recent high-profile case, the British
historian David Irving spent 13 months in jail in Austria for
challenging the Holocaust before being released last month.

The debate about how to reconcile freedom of speech with the fight
against racism gained added momentum recently when the French
National Assembly passed a law making it a criminal offense to deny
that the massacre of Armenians by Turks during World War I was a case
of genocide. While the Armenian community applauded the law, Turkey
accused France of restricting the freedom of expression and rewriting
history for political ends.

The publication last year of Danish cartoons satirizing the Prophet
Muhammad, which provoked fury in the Muslim world, has prompted some
Muslims to accuse the EU of double standards in its fight against
racism.

Abdullah Gul, the Turkish foreign minister, last March called on
European nations to review laws to ensure they outlaw defamation of
all religions. He told a meeting of EU foreign ministers that many
Muslims believed European laws protected established Christian
religions, and banned anti- Semitism, while doing nothing to defend
Muslims who felt offended.

Emine Bozkurt, a Dutch socialist of Turkish descent, who is president
of a European Parliament working group aimed at combating racism,
said the scope of the German proposal should be expanded. But she
acknowledged that this could prove difficult. "We have seen
increasing xenophobia and racism in Europe, so the German proposal is
a good idea," she said. "But member states have different legal
cultures and different laws, and this is a difficult issue."