How many countries is holocaust denial illegal

Northwestern University continued to employ electrical engineering professor Arthur Butz after he continued to deny the Holocaust, but he was careful not to espouse such views in the classroom. In similar circumstances, Florida Atlantic University eventually expelled James Tracy, a Professor of Communications, after he denied that a mass shooting had taken place at a Newtown, Connecticut elementary school in December However, it largely did so on the basis that he had missed a deadline that the university had issued to him in which he was supposed to indicate how he had distanced his views from the university.

He notes that President Trump tapped Myron Ebell to head the transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency EPA even though he was well known as a climate change denier, despite a consensus of scientific evidence to the contrary.

This article was originally published in and updated in Professor Rob Kahn teaches at St. He has also written on topics such as cross-burning in the United States, blasphemy regulation and the defamation of religions debate, and use of law to ban statements about the past. Bischoping, Katherine. Douglas, Lawrence. New Haven: Yale University Press, Kahn, Robert A. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, Lipstadt, Deborah. New York: Penguin Random House, Lasson, Kenneth. Wolf, Christopher. The Internet The main purveyor of neo-Nazi hate speech including music , however, is still the Internet.

For music, the neo-Nazi websites offer free downloading of their antisemtic and racist songs. These sites are set up outside Germany, such as in the United States and Denmark, where their existence is not prohibited see further discussion below. France 1. The Law. French law does not explicitly criminalize denial of the Holocaust.

Article R of the French Penal Code prohibits the public display of Nazi uniforms, insignias and emblems. In October , the French National Assembly also adopted a bill making it a crime to contest that the massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in constituted genocide. The bill, yet to become law in France as of the time of this presentation, was heavily debated both in France and abroad.

In , the bill will be considered by the French Senate and then, if passed by that chamber, by French President Jacques Chirac who must sign it into law. Application In October , French judicial authorities opened a judicial investigation to determine whether French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen should be tried for comments denying the brutality of the Nazi occupation of France during World War II.

As a result, a French investigating magistrate is presently considering whether to recommend prosecution of Le Pen for "justifying war crimes" and "complicity in contesting crimes against humanity. Faurisson has been prosecuted on several occasions for his public statements and publications denying the Holocaust. In , Faurisson was fined and given a three month suspended sentence for "racial defamation" after making remarks on a radio show supporting Holocaust denial.

In , Faurisson gave an interview to a far-right magazine where he described the gas chambers as a "myth" and was thereupon charged under the Gayssot Law.

France was also the forum for another famous Holocaust denial-related case. The French court found that the availability of such items in France through the Internet, even though the sales were conducted in the United States, to be in violation of the French law cited above, Article R, banning the public display of Nazi symbols. The lower court granted Yahoo!

Eastern Europe Western European nations are not the only ones to criminalize denial of the Holocaust. Eastern European nations after their liberation from Communism have also followed suit, but with a wrinkle. For example, in November , the Estonian government approved a draft law making it a crime to display Nazi-era symbols in public. Current legislation bans inciting hatred on the grounds of political views or ethnic or social status, but does not specifically mention symbols.

The maximum penalty under the new law would be three years in prison. Eastern European governments are also split over restrictions on symbols because of concerns about freedom of speech.

Estonia, however, was not the first one to take the step of banning both Nazi and Communist-era symbols. Other former communist nations enacting similar bans since the fall of the Iron Curtain include Latvia, Hungary, and Poland. Latvia, Estonia's neighbor, which suffered a similar fate, has a law banning the use of both Soviet and Nazi symbols at public meetings. Poland, one of the most serious victims of Nazi barbarity, in article 55 of the Polish Criminal Code criminalizes denial of both Nazi-era and Communist-era crimes.

European nations without laws banning denial of the Holocaust and promotion of anti-Semitic and racist The Scandinavian countries to date have put a higher premium on free speech over criminalizing Holocaust denial or hate speech. For example, in Denmark a private radio station -- Radio Oasis -- broadcasts uncensored, right-wing extremist propaganda and does so with the support of state funds under a Danish law guaranteeing state funds for non-commercial radio and television stations.

Great Britain Great Britain likewise does not criminalize Holocaust denial or the public display of Nazi symbols. When Prince Harry, for instance, appeared at a costume party wearing a Nazi uniform, he was roundly criticized for his insensitivity, but it was clear that no British laws were broken. In contrast, when years earlier a partygoer in Germany appeared wearing a Hitler mask, criminal charges were brought against him.

Despite the absence of Holocaust denial laws, Great Britain was the scene of one the most publicized legal events involving Holocaust denial. In , self-described British historian David Irving brought a civil defamation suit against American professor 8 Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books stemming from a book on Holocaust deniers written by Lipstadt and published in by Penguin. In the book, Lipstadt named Irving as a Holocaust denier. While Irving began his writing career as a mainstream historian of World War II, his views over the years became more bizarre and he began to ally himself with groups denying the Holocaust, before whom he has made numerous appearances.

While Irving in the past promulgated the controversial thesis that Hitler had not known about or ordered the destruction of European Jewry, at the Zundel trial he went a step further by nothing that he now was convinced that no gas chambers had been present at Auschwitz. What made him different from others calling the Holocaust a lie was that he was an author whose works were published by prominent publishing houses.

Despite his bizarre pronouncements, he was still viewed by some as a respected military historian. The opinion concludes with the following finding: My conclusion [is] that Irving displays all the characteristics of a Holocaust denier. He repeatedly makes assertions about the Holocaust which are offensive to Jews in their terms and unsupported by or contrary to the historical record….

Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist and that he associates with right wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.

In February, , Irving was jailed in Austria for three years for Holocaust denial. His arrest and trial were based on speeches he made in Austria during a visit and lecture series when he stated there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz and no extermination camps in the Third Reich. He also called Adolf Hitler a protector of Europe's Jews. During his trial, Irving claimed that he had again changed his views on gas chambers. He 9 told the judge that he is now convinced, contrary to his earlier assertions in the London defamation trial, at the Zundel trial and in , that gas chambers did in fact exist.

However, he continued to doubt the figure of 6 million Jews killed. The Austrian judge nevertheless found him guilty of violating Austrian law. As of this presentation, he is still in prison and appealing his conviction. North America A. Canada Section of the Canadian federal criminal code prohibits the promotion of hatred against any "identifiable group," but the statute is notoriously difficult to prosecute. For this reason, for example, it was not used against Ernst Zundel during his trials in Canada.

The previous discussion noted the difficulty of trying someone for Holocaust denial in Canada in light of the decision of the Canadian Supreme Court that laws attempting to criminalize such denial are incompatible with Canadian guarantees of free speech. The United States Broad interpretation by the U. Supreme Court of the First Amendment guarantees in its constitution has made denial of the Holocaust, promotion of Nazi ideology and dissemination of racist and anti-Semitic speech completely legal under American law.

As a result, most of the Internet websites with neo-Nazi content originate in the United States but are available to anyone in the world with access to the Internet.

The organizers specifically chose Skokie because of the large survivor population. Despite governmental attempts to stop the march as an affront to the dignity to the survivors and the trauma to be inflicted upon them of seeing Nazis march in their neighborhood, the federal courts allowed the march to proceed.

NGOs in the U. Laws against Holocaust denial were first enacted in Europe to curb far-right extremism, with Germany leading the way. Holocaust denial did exist in most of post-World War II Germany, but it did not attract wide-scale public attention until the s, when it began to be featured increasingly in the propaganda of the far right. In response, Germany introduced a law in that outlawed Holocaust denial and other forms of Nazi symbols, and a subsequent law in that made Holocaust denial a more serious criminal offense under the general anti-incitement law.

Considering its history, Germany felt a special obligation to curb anti-Semitic extremism, but throughout that decade, a handful of countries followed its example.

France banned Holocaust denial in under the Gayssot Act. Austria, although it previously had laws to suppress any revival of Nazism, did not have laws banning specifically denial until Then came Belgium and Spain in though Spain rescinded the law in , Poland in , and so on. In evaluating these laws, it is important to remember that no society has completely unrestricted speech.

The United States and the United Kingdom have libel laws and laws against direct incitement of violence, and other democracies have even greater restrictions. There are, moreover, countries going through transitional phases in which memory laws—laws that enshrine state-approved interpretations and narratives of history—prove not just prudent but absolutely necessary. Take Rwanda as an example. In the decades following the Rwandan genocide of , state leaders, though expressing an eagerness to facilitate a greater environment of open discourse, also had to take into account the real danger of the revival of ethnic conflict, which had brought about the recent genocide.

The Rwandan government therefore passed laws in and to criminalize the denial of the genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus. Thus, present-day Rwanda seems to have the context to warrant laws against the denial of its genocide.

The question, then, is whether present-day Europe also has such a context. After the conviction of David Irving, many Americans, who generally have a hard time coming to terms with such relatively strict legal censorship in Europe, weighed in.

Peter Singer, for example, makes the point that Holocaust deniers likely will be more persuaded of their error if their views are refuted by argument and evidence and that, on the other hand, they will be more inclined to believe in a conspiracy if the likes of them are being imprisoned.

Roger W. It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers.