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?
