Nouvelle Menace Liberticide De La Part De La Présidence Européenne

[José]

Le gouvernement allemand prétend, durant sa présidence de l'Union européenne, transformer en délit au niveau européen la négation de l'Holocauste et d'autres génocides. Le Ministre de la Justice allemand, Brigitte Zypries, veut ainsi relancer un processus, qui avait été bloqué par l'Italie durant le gouvernement Berlusconi, visant à "une harmonisation minimale de la législation pénale" pour des questions en relations avec le nazisme.

http://www.zeit.de/news/artikel/2007/01/08/87344.xml

[h16]

Ah la la la la la. On n'en a pas fini avec la bienpensance dégoulinante.

[pankkake]

C'est revenu sur la table un paquet de fois, ça (par exemple interdire les symboles nazis). Seulement les pays de l'Est voulaient faire de même pour le communisme, ce qui risque de surprendre un peu la France .

Enfin bref, l'UE est de plus en plus liberticide, rien de nouveau.

[José]

The Economist se penche sur la question :

Slippery slope

Jan 25th 2007

From The Economist print edition

Holocaust denial is profoundly wrong. But should it be illegal?

GOOD intentions are rarely enough. There is no doubt that in proposing to make Holocaust denial a crime throughout the European Union and to ban the display of the swastika (to some a 5,000-year-old symbol of peace), the German government is activated by the best of intentions. But caution applies even in this matter. One of the most moving books about the Holocaust, one describing the moral compromises forced upon leaders of the Judenräte, Jewish councils appointed by Nazis in the ghettos of Warsaw, Vilnius and Lodz, takes for its title the common adage about good intentions: “The Pavement of Hell”. As Jacques Chirac says, Holocaust denial is a perversion of the soul and a crime against truth. But that does not mean it should be a crime in law.

Criminalising it would obviously limit freedom of speech, one of the basic freedoms on which other liberties depend. But that alone is not a proper objection. Brigitte Zypries, the German justice minister, is surely justified when she says, “We believe there are limits to freedom of expression.” The question is where you draw those limits. In the liberal tradition, they have been put at the point where speech becomes a threat to others (hence child pornography is rightly banned; so is the proverbial shouting of “Fire” in a crowded theatre—at least if it is false).

But Ms Zypries goes further. History, she argues, puts Germany under a special obligation to combat racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia. “We should not wait until it comes to deeds. We must act against the intellectual pathbreakers of the crime.” This is a much more controversial claim.

In its favour, one might cite the Holocaust itself. In describing Hitler's personal responsibility for “the final solution to the Jewish problem”, historians have mostly stressed its indirect character. He got his way not through written orders but through his minions' understanding of his hunger for extermination, expressed in “Mein Kampf”. So imagine if the book had been banned: might that have struck at the “intellectual pathbreaker” of the greatest of crimes? At a time when Iranians have elected a Holocaust denier as president and when the leader of a new far-right group in the European Parliament is facing charges of Holocaust denial in France, it cannot be said that there are no politically influential Holocaust deniers around.

But one is still entitled to ask whether the proposed remedies would actually work. Eleven European countries already have national laws against Holocaust denial—Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Spain. These countries contain most of Europe's largest racist and xenophobic parties. Perhaps one might turn the argument around and say that Nazism is such a threat in those countries that anti-Nazi laws are justified. But even if that were true—and the claim is surely an exaggeration—it would only justify having laws there, not throughout the EU. Anyway, the German government's argument is different. It says laws against Holocaust denial can help stop anti-Semitism before it really starts—which seems highly doubtful.

Laws against Holocaust denial also come up against the rule of unintended consequences. In theory, outlawing Holocaust denial would put an end to the belief, except for a few misguided hold-outs who would be dealt with by the impartial majesty of the law. In practice, the courts would be just as likely to end up giving publicity to the hateful views of people like David Irving, a British “historian” who was sentenced to prison amid fanfare in Austria. Or they could become circuses for cases like that of Britain's Prince Harry, who wore a swastika-emblazoned uniform to a fancy dress party but was merely pilloried for it in the press since Britain does not ban Nazi regalia. Or the courts would make idiots of themselves, as happened in the case of a Stuttgart clothing company which sold T-shirts with swastikas crossed out to show opposition to fascism: the manager was prosecuted.

Where might it end?

Holocaust-denial laws, then, may not be the best way of dealing with the problem of Holocaust denial. In addition, they impose their own, often hidden, costs. Such laws can take you down a slippery slope. One may think the Holocaust was a uniquely dreadful event. Even so, it is hard, once you have passed a Holocaust-denial law, not to extend it. Asked why the EU proposed to pass a law about the genocide victims of one of 20th-century Europe's totalitarian ideologies (fascism) but not the other (communism), Ms Zypries replied it was just a matter of timing. By implication, the EU will one day propose banning gulag-denial too. This may seem fine, but sooner or later genocide-denial laws end up restricting expressions that might cause ethnic or religious offence. They can quickly result in a lot of speech-restricting laws.

All this may seem an exaggeration, but remember that many European countries do have anti-incitement rules already. French law, for example, imposes sanctions on those who deny crimes against humanity or who express racist points of view. When Ms Zypries defended restricting free speech, she went on to say that “the limits are there when it is offensive to other religious and ethnic groups.” This is close to saying something is a crime if the victim says so—an unhappy legal principle, and an encouragement for people to take offence at every opportunity.

Holocaust denial laws are wrong whoever imposes them. But they are at least understandable in countries where Nazism had indigenous roots. No such excuse can be made for the European Union as a whole. In addition to all the other problems, an EU-wide Holocaust law offends against the principle that laws should be enacted at the lowest possible level of government, not the highest. If European politicians want to do something about Holocaust denial, perhaps they should worry more about the government of Iran, which contains a Holocaust-denier one really needs to worry about.

http://www.economist.com/world/europe/disp…tory_id=8592923

[Fredo]

C'est revenu sur la table un paquet de fois, ça (par exemple interdire les symboles nazis). Seulement les pays de l'Est voulaient faire de même pour le communisme, ce qui risque de surprendre un peu la France .

Ça, ça me plairait bien. Marre de cette hypocrisie de deux poids deux mesures.