French Council Strikes Down Bill on Armenian Genocide Denial
The French Constitutional Council on Tuesday struck down a draft law that would have criminalized the denial of an Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Turks, legislation that has soured relations between France and Turkey.
The controversy over the bill is likely to persist, however. President Nicolas Sarkozy, who backed the legislation, vowed to submit a new bill with revised language. He has in the past indicated that he would push to see that denial of an Armenian genocide is made a crime even if the council ruled against the draft law.
Mr. Sarkozy offered no indication on Tuesday as to how he thought a new bill might overcome the objections of the council, which ruled that “the legislature did unconstitutional harm to the exercise of freedom of expression and communication” in approving the legislation.
After passage of the bill in the French Senate last month, dozens of lawmakers from across the political spectrum submitted appeals to the council, insisting that the legislation violated free speech rights and that it was not the place of the legislature to impose its own explanation for the hundreds of thousands of Armenian deaths that began in 1915, amid the chaos of World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/world/europe/french-bill-on-armenian-genocide-is-struck-down.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
I realise that the separation of the Atlantic has a moderating effect on such events
but that sort of thing is still taken quite seriously in Europe as they had a close-up
view of the previous occasions.
