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Tuesday, 24 January 2012 |
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Paris, 24 January 2012 In the name of our organization, Liberté pour l’histoire, we wish to express our acute disappointment that a majority in the Senate is so subservient to directives from politicians and pressure from voters that it has voted – without altering so much as a comma – in favour of the law that the National Assembly passed under highly questionable circumstances with a show of hands by fifty deputies. |
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Monday, 02 January 2012 |
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This article appeared in Le Monde on 28 December 2011 as Lois mémorielles : pour en finir avec ce sport législatif purement français. By Pierre Nora,
Chariman of Liberté pour l’histoire We could not have expected a worse outcome than this. And if the Senate does approve this disastrous law on “the criminalization of the denial of any legally defined genocide,” the hopes of all those who have criticized the extension of historical memory laws, and all the efforts of Liberté pour l’histoire since the founding of that organization in 2005, will be wrecked. There were barely fifty deputies present at the Assembly session during which this law was voted in by a show of hands. I have no doubt that the more alert among them will be kicking themselves once they see the consequences of their action. The magnitude of this disaster is such that the whole subject has to be taken up again from the beginning. |
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Thursday, 05 January 2012 |
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The historical memory laws: Lawmakers create a monster By Françoise Chandernagor, Vice-President, Liberté pour l’histoire.
This article appeared in Le Figaro on 29 December 2011 as Lois mémorielles : un monstre législatif. By making it a crime to contest the genocides recognized as such under French law, the National Assembly has just given birth to a conceptual monster – a monster whose parents are malformed law and senseless history. The law adopted on 21 December not only makes it impossible for historians to carry out any research on the circumstances, methods, or magnitude of the extermination of the Armenians in 1915; it also creates a mechanism of repression to punish automatically anyone who minimizes any past crimes that our Parliament will one day choose to define as genocide. |
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Sunday, 22 January 2012 |
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Next week's bill on denial of Ottoman atrocities against Armenians is an attack on free speech, one of many around the world. Timothy Garton Ash, guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 18 January 2012. Next Monday the French Senate is to vote on a bill that will criminalise denial of the Armenian genocide of 1915, along with any other events recognised as genocide in French law. The bill has already passed through the National Assembly, the lower house of the French parliament. The Senate should reject it, in the name of free speech, the freedom of historical inquiry and article 11 of France's path-breaking 1789 declaration of the rights of man and citizen ("the free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights …"). |
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Wednesday, 18 January 2012 |
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Essay published in Libération, 17 January 2012, by Esther Benbassa, Director of Studies at the Ecole Pratique des hautes études (Sorbonne) and member of the Senate for Val-de-Marne representing Europe Écologie – les Verts. On 23 January 2012 the French Senate will debate a bill criminalizing denial of the Armenian genocide. It was first introduced by a deputy from the UMP party and was passed by the National Assembly on 22 December 2011, by a handful of votes. The Assembly’s legal committee amended its title, so that the crime to be punished is no longer the denial of the Armenian genocide but more loosely the “contestation of the fact of any genocide recognized by law.” An earlier version of this law was in fact already passed by the Assembly on 12 October 2006, but it died in the Senate. Likewise, a similar bill filed on 5 July 2010 in the Senate was dropped on 4 May 2011. |
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Wednesday, 18 January 2012 |
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Essay by Robert Badinter, published in Le Monde, 15 January 2012. I know from personal experience how painful it is to hear someone deny the reality of a genocide that consumed those nearest and dearest to you. So I understand why the Armenian community should call so passionately on the international community, and especially Turkey, to recognize the 1915 Armenian genocide. Yet no matter how much sympathy one may feel for this cause, it ought not to lead to support of the proposed law (passed by the National Assembly on 22 December 2011 and about to be submitted to the Senate), a law that would punish with a year’s imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros anyone who “contests or grossly minimizes any genocide recognized as such under French law.” |
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