The European Union is floating a proposal to outlaw racism and xenophobia which it defines as a dislike of individuals based on “race, colour, descent, religion or belief, national or ethnic origin.” The law would also make it a crime to engage in the “public denial or trivialization of the crimes dealt with by the international military tribunal established in 1945.”
Although British Prime Minster Tony Blair had expressed some limited support for a Holocaust denial law in Great Britain, the UK is opposing the new proposal and can effectively block the law since it requires a unanimous vote of the 15 EU members to take effect.
Laws outlawing racism and Holocaust denial are already in effect in some European countries, leading to jail terms for people based entirely for the ideas they express. According to the Daily Telegraph,
In Germany a historian who claimed that AUschwitz prisoners enjoyed cinemas, a swimming pool and brothels was sentenced to 10 months in jail; and an American served three years of a four-year sentence for distributing anti-holocaust material.
Great Britain, meanwhile, saw a civil trial in which Holocaust denier David Irving sued an American history professor who had written a book accusing Irving of being a Holocaust denier and an anti-Semite. Irving failed in his lawsuit and the British court’s findings and verdict reinforced the fact that Holocaust deniers are in much the same category as those who believe that aliens built the pyramids (the deniers are actually worse, however, because the alien pyramid folks don’t generally espouse viciously anti-Semitic dogma).
As the Daily Telegraph wrote in an editorial,
Their [other European countries] history is very different from ours. In Britain, the state has no compelling need to imprison the handful of cranks who deny that the Holocaust took place . . . The truth that the Holocaust did happen appears all the more unassailable for the fact that Britons are free to deny it if they wish.
We have plenty of laws to prevent people from inciting others to violence, and it is sensible that we should. But the Government is absolutely right to resist this latest forced assault on British freedom, and must no compromise on it.
Well said.
Source:
Liberty to think ill. The Daily Telegraph, April 9, 2002.
Blair shies away from EU law on Holocaust. Philip Johnston, The Daily Telegraph, April 9, 2002.
Up with the EU