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Tuesday, 29 January 2013 |
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Some Comments on the EU Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA on Racism and Xenophobia. By Paolo Lobba 1. INTRODUCTIONThe European Union’s Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA (hereafter ‘Decision’)1 entered into force after protracted negotiations among Member States which reflected the controversial nature of the issues addressed therein. The Decision has its origins in anti-racism policies pursued by the EU since the mid 1980s and it covers a wide range of measures designed to counter racism and xenophobia, including the criminalisation of public incitement to racial violence and hatred, liability and penalties for legal persons, and rules ensuring a broad exercise of jurisdiction. Above all, it foresees for the first time criminal provisions seeking to ban not only the denial, justification or gross trivialisation of the Holocaust alone, but also that of most other core international crimes – an array of conduct termed here ‘denialism’ or ‘negationism’. |
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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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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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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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LPH
