Armenian Genocide Excluded from EU Ban
Note: you can submit your view on this article by clicking on http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article1680192.ece .
PLEASE DO SO ON 23RD APRIL 2007, THE EVE OF THE COMMEMORATION OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE.
[See sample submission that follows the article]
From The Times April 20, 2007.
EU makes it against law to condone genocide - David Charter in Luxembourg
Condoning or "grossly trivialising" genocide will become a crime punishable by up to three years in prison across Europe, although justice ministers failed to agree a specific ban on denying the Holocaust yesterday.
Germany used its presidency of the EU to push through the first Europe-wide race-hate laws, regarded by Berlin as an historic obligation in the 50th anniversary year of the union created to preserve peace and prosperity after the Second World War.
Under pressure from nations worried about freedom of speech, led by Britain, Germany scaled back ambitions to replicate its strict laws of Holocaust denial and dropped plans to outlaw the display of Nazi symbols at an EU level.
All 27 EU nations will be obliged to criminalise "publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes" but the test for prosecution was set deliberately high to secure agreement in Luxembourg. Cases will succeed only where "the conduct is carried out in a manner likely to incite violence or hatred".
The definition of genocide will be that set at the Nuremberg trials and by the International Criminal Court, meaning that it will include Nazi crimes and those in Rwanda and Yugoslavia but not the Armenian genocide - a definition disputed by Turkey.
Poland, Slovenia and the Baltic states lobbied hard for - but failed to win - the inclusion of a crime of denying, condoning or trivialising atrocities committed in the name of Joseph Stalin in the new law.
They did, however, secure a pledge that the European Commission would prepare a Green Paper on 20th-century genocidal crimes and carry out a review within two years on whether denying these should come under the scope of the race-hate law.
This led to accusations that the EU was trying to rewrite history. Graham Watson, MEP, leader of the Liberal group in the European Parliament, said: "The EU has no business legislating on history. We should leave that to historians and individual member states."
Attempts to harmonise EU laws on hate crimes are both illiberal and nonsensical. [This] risks opening the floodgates on a plethora of historical controversies . . . whose inclusion could pose a grave threat to freedom of speech."
Franco Frattini, the European Justice Commissioner, said: "We have proposed public hearings and I propose to involve all stakeholders, including historians. The final result should be to improve public awareness, especially for younger people and students. We do not want to rewrite history. History is history." The EU-wide crime of inciting violence or hatred against a person's race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin agreed yesterday will result in conviction only where there is "intentional conduct". Officials said there would be no change in British law, where there are already penalties of up to seven years for inciting racial hatred under the Religious and Racial Hatred Act of 2006, which was used as a model for the final EU text.
Britain also pushed successfully to ensure that religious attacks would be covered only if they were of a racist or xenophobic nature, so that criticism of Islam or other faiths would not automatically fall under the new measures.
Example of submission (but give your own thoughts)
The EU should be thoroughly ashamed at arriving at very selective genocide denial legislation that will not deter those who may develop such tendencies in the future. Nor is it only historic as some would want to believe. The denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive Turkish governments is at the root of the only closed border in Europe at present, that between Turkey and the Armenia. Only two weeks ago Turkey stopped a UN exhibition organised by the London based Aegis Trust on the Rwandan Genocide because of words that touched its sensibilities. When will the dummkopfs in EU institutions realise that only a total unequivocal ban on all genocides at any time, with recognition by the perpetrators, lead to a safer more stable world? Or are we all prepared to stomach the terrible events we know are happening in Darfur to continue on?
1 comment:
Is it up to the EU to set a precedent, FROM one humanity over another?
The genocide issue in respect of excluding the Armenian Genocide of 1915, is the most HEINOUS to describe it in a word! I would like to know how this was concluded! Must everything Jewish come first! Even the word Holocaust was stripped from the Armenian Genocide and was made a word synonymous with the Jews. STOP, BEFORE ANYONE LABELS ME ANTI SEMITIC! But, brothers and sisters, let’s be realistic, how many lives must be lost to murder, be it deportation or systematic killing of a nation over many years. Sustained and pressured killing takes many forms and many guises, be they through oppression or deportation.
Domination, coercion, cruelty, tyranny, repression OR subjugation and the application in one way or another, of the withdrawal of liberty! Allowing the Turks to use the word deportations in the terms they mean it in the Ottoman era is agreeing to them saying, ‘We can Exile, by death by sending the people into the desert, like Christ! They were exemplifying, ‘saying ask your Christ to delivery you! The expulsion, extraditions, expatriation, no matter which of the words, one uses there is no getting away from it they were banishing Armenian’s from Armenian Lands! How ARE the Turkish government justified by banishing a nation on mass! For standing up for their selves! For fighting for their lives, lands and culture. Most of all, our faith too! They finally grouped and called their selves Henchag, Tushnag or Ramgavar! What is in a name they were all fighting for one thing at the end, ‘FREEDOM,’ THEY were the voice of the people and they were formed from the oppressions for hundreds of years. Their voices were not heard, the world chose not to hear them. As indeed the world chooses not to hear them, once more! Not to recognise what is as plain as a wart on the end of a nose or clear as water from a tap! Now I do not have words of eloquence to render because the world has gone mad and amid the madness we are completely horrified, shocked and numbed. We do not need to rely on bigoted group of well mannered good intended but ill informed or dare I say politically blackmailed representatives to tell us what has been denied us for decades! We know what is right and wrong!
Deny the Genocide and be enlightened that on the dawning of another day when you too are woken in your beds or your children taken to task by oppressors in your own lands. This Island of the free, don’t you think that for one moment you will not pay for the blinding paths that you ARE lead, they will not bring forth peace or the cessation from Genocide and mass murders. We are still allowing it to happen in many parts of the world. So next time you men of power, give or take away what is or is not classed as genocide from an already broken people let me say, ‘rather it were not than to be told it is not!’ And if by recognising the Armenian Genocide it means that Armenian’s have detracted from the Holocaust then we would rather give the word holocaust back than for it to have happened to o Nation and for the world to deny the right to mourn our loved ones who were buried indignantly, without burial rights.
What gives the EU THE RIGHT TO WARP HISTORY IN FAVOUR OF ONE NATION and in doing so playing with the ying and yang of true balance of truth, dignity and integrity. You may play the game of right and wrong but history will repeat its self and you will all see that we the Armenians do not need to be told. We know, and until they the EU, do, many genocides will come and go at the bewilderment and the very gaze of those who maybe the next victims of Genocide.
There should be an outrage from this news but are we worried? No! Because they, the Turkish Government have done their worst – the Armenian Genocide of 1915 did happen but the subsequent denials are the repeat of a killing which occurred, revived and rein acted in the minds of Armenians. You are killing us over again; the pain is more intense, the wounds becoming much deeper!
How can the EU make such a ruling condoning the Armenian Genocide when such a ruling its self excludes the first nation of the 20th Century to undergo suffering of Genocide, then for the second time in the 21st Century by a ruling in Luxembourg to excuse it. It overlooks it like a marital suppression of a wife over her husband’s infidelities or visa verse! Pardon me but, who wears the trousers and who wears the skirt in the relationship between countries? Excuses, excuses! I feel they are having an orgy.
Post a Comment