RACIAL BUT NOT RELIGIOUS HATRED BECOMES A CRIME IN EU
By staff writers
Ekklesia, UK
April 27 2007
Incitement to racial hatred and xenophobia is to become a crime across
the European Union. But after a fraught debate involving significant
national differences, attempts to single out religious aggravation
and holocaust denial were rejected.
In Britain the EU law will not mean any changes to domestic law
because the 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act is tougher.
Last week six years of negotiations concluded in Luxembourg with a
compromise that struggled to balance freedom of expression with a
tough stance on anti-semitism and other forms of racism and prejudice.
Justice ministers from all 27 European Union countries agreed that
incitement to hatred or violence against a group or a person that is
based on colour, race, national or ethnic origin, would be punishable
by a sentence of between one and three years’ jail.
Anti-racism campaigners, Jewish groups and Germany, which holds the
EU presidency, are concerned that the law neither bans holocaust
denial as such, nor Nazi symbols. But free speech and secular groups
say that this is appropriate, though they are politically strongly
opposed to such things.
"Europe has a special historic responsibility to combat anti-semitism
and it is a shame that the final version did not include this
[provision]," the European Jewish Congress declared after the decision.
Germany, France, Belgium, Austria, Spain and several eastern European
countries have laws banning holocaust denial. These laws will still
apply. Britain, Ireland and the Nordic countries have always resisted
such a law so as not to compromise academic or artistic freedom unless
it specifically incites racial hatred.
There is no reference either to the mass killings of Armenians by the
Ottoman Turks in 1915, which Armenians insist should be recognised
as genocide. Turkey, a candidate for EU membership, had made clear it
would object strongly to this – indeed it is an imprisonable offence
to raise the issue.
The new EU legislation will need to be ratified by some national
parliaments. It criminalises "publicly condoning, denying or grossly
trivialising crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war
crimes … when the conduct is carried out in a manner likely to
incite to violence or hatred against a group or [group] member".