Turkish Daily News , Turkey
April 21 2007

Not many satisfied with race hate law
Saturday, April 21, 2007

The EU justice ministers’ agreement to criminalize incitement to
racial hatred and xenophobia on Thursday in Luxembourg after long
and fractious negotiations, which took nearly six years left many
parties across Europe dissatisfied with the outcome and shed light
on major differences between member states, wrote the Guardian and
Financial Times.

According to the British daily Guardian, anti-racism campaigners,
Jewish groups and the EU term president Germany were disappointed with
the fact that the law does not ban Holocaust denial and Nazi symbols
as such. The European Jewish Congress expressed its uneasiness about
the law by emphasizing Europe’s special historic responsibility to
combat anti-Semitism, which was not included in the final version of
the draft. The draft has also made apparent the difference between
European countries such as Germany, Austria and France, which already
have laws banning denial of the Holocaust and Britain, Ireland and
the Nordic countries that resisted such a measure in the past so as
not to compromise academic or artistic freedom unless it specifically
incites racial hatred.

The business daily Financial Times reported on the other hand that
the Armenians were also displeased with the law since the events
of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire during World War One, which Armenians
insist should be recognized as genocide were not included in the text
of the law. Laurent Leylekian, the executive director of the European
Armenian Federation expressed fierce criticism and said the law showed
"a great amount of hypocrisy". "Excluding Armenia’s suffering would
be a moral failure," he said.

According to the FT, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as well as the
eastern European states were also unhappy with the ultimate wording
of the law that does not contain any special reference to the Stalin
and communist era crimes. ISTANBUL-Turkish Daily News