SHOULD WE EXTRADITE HOLOCAUST DENIERS?

Guardian
03 oct 08
UK

What should we do about Dr Fredrick Töben, detained at Heathrow
this week under a fast-track EU arrest warrant issued by the district
court in Mannheim?

Dr who? I know, it’s been a busy week, and I hadn’t heard of him
either until he popped up to be remanded in custody by Westminster
magistrates. By the time you read this he may be on a plane to Germany
– or home to Australia.

Töben is a 64-year-old German-born historian who runs something called
the Adelaide Institute. He denies frequent accusations that he is a
Holocaust denier, but judging by some of the things he says and writes
he makes a pretty good job of passing himself off as one. Phrases like
"Holocaust racketeers, the corpse peddlers and the Shoah business
merchants" characterise some of his scholarship.

In other words he believes that the six-million-dead German Holocaust
which took place during the 1933-45 Hitler regime, a well-documented
narrative accepted by most historians, did not occur, or did so on
a much smaller scale. If you challenge the Holocaust you must expect
persecution and abuse, he says.

Well, plenty of people, not all of them Jewish, have pursued him
during a teaching career on three continents – from New Zealand
to Nigeria. In 1999 he served nine months in a German prison for
breaching the Holocaust law there that forbids the "defaming of the
dead" in this way. Needless to add, Töben attended the Holocaust
revisionist conference held in Tehran in 2006.

A nasty piece of work by the sound of it, and some nasty websites
are exercised on Töben’s behalf.

Why should we care? Two strands of the affair trouble me. One is the
restriction on free speech inherent in the laws that some countries
– not Britain – have against Holocaust denial. We have broader laws
against racial incitement in general, which seems acceptable to me,
though not to those who believe that older public order laws would
have proved sufficient.

I can see why the Germans felt the need to enact such specific
legislation.

After all, they did it, and have an obligation to discharge the
historic debt, something, incidentally, they have done pretty well –
at least in the old West Germany – over the years.

In other countries, several across Europe, such law smacks of
"exceptionalism", special pleading in a world where diverse historic
injustices abound. In Turkey you can get into trouble for saying there
was a holocaust against the Armenians in 1915. In Iran they call us
hypocrites for being selective in our championship of free speech.

The other problem I have with this is process. When the European Arrest
Warrant came into force in 2004 to help police fight cross border
crime – and post 9/11 terrorism – more effectively it abolished the
"dual criminality" principle.

That had meant that a suspect could not be extradited for an alleged
offence that was not an offence in the country where he/she had been
detained. When Britain joined the new procedure ministers assured
critics who feared Kafkaesque possibilities that no one would be
extradited for actions legal in Britain, let alone crimes they didn’t
know existed.

But here we have it: Töben taken off a plane at Heathrow and quick
to protest that he is the victim of a legal ambush, an abuse of
process in a country which has not – yet – succumbed to Germany’s
"witch-hunt mentality" in this matter. Food for thought there that
makes me uncomfortable.

I am also aware of German courts, in cases involving disputed custody
cases where one parent is German, behaving pretty badly towards the
claims of a non-German spouse. Catherine Meyer, wife of Chris Meyer,
former British ambassador to both Bonn and Washington, did not see her
"kidnapped’ children for years.

Holocaust denial is a lesser offence than involvement in war crimes
themselves. Britain has a different problem here in that, in the chaos
after 1945 when it was often hard to sort victim from persecutor, a lot
of bad people slipped into this country and led quiet, guilty lives.

In 1991 Margaret Thatcher used the parliament acts to override the
House of Lords, which had thrown out her war crimes bill, passed=2
0by the Commons. The average age of current MPs in 1939 was six,
one peer remarked during the debate: let it go. But some 300 suspects
live on in the UK, countered the bill’s supporters.

At the time I sympathised with the critics. It was all a long time ago,
witnesses and accused were old, far away or even dead, their memories
faulty at best. We should not forget, but it smacked of retrospective
legislation, pandering again.

Last time I looked there had not been a single successful
prosecution. Other more recent war crimes dominate the headlines. Who’s
right?

–Boundary_(ID_6qeGeBgw4VmxzSXXv8EVK A)–