Tuesday, May 29, 2007

EU Legislation on genocide denial: Still in flux

IN mid-April I said the proposed EU legislation had been defeated. The fact is that it is still in discussion and there is, according to Bruno Waterfield, correspondent for the Daily Telegraph [London], a fair bit of jockeying going on in various preparatory committees.

The UK pushed and got a raising of the threshold for an offence to that which exists in British legislation on race and religious hatred. The threshold includes targeting groups or using "threatening, abuse or insulting" language. It is felt that this threshold will not limit the free speech of scholars or artists.

Waterfield wrties that "The scope of legislation remained the same: the Nazi crimes as defined in the courts and any genocide as defined in (the broad) statute of the International Criminal Court."

Eventually the legislation could be extended to encompass Stalin era crimes.

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