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Comments (0)Hungarian President Laszlo Solyom signed into law legislative reforms making Holocaust denial a criminal offense.
The law adopted Wednesday makes Holocaust denial an offense punishable by imprisonment of up to three years.
It brings Hungary in line with other European countries under Nazi occupation during the World War II in which Holocaust denial already is a criminal offense.
The reforms proposed by the minority Socialist administration were approved by the Hungarian Parliament late last month. But there were serious doubts over their passage into the statute books because Solyom had blocked similar legislative attempts in the past, provoking outrage from the Hungarian Jewish community.
This time the president expressed disapproval over the timing of the reforms, as they coincide with bitter political campaigning preceding next month’s parliamentary elections.
The elections are widely expected to defeat the government and produce an ultra-Conservative administration led by the populist Fidesz Party. All Fidesz deputies abstained from last month’s parliamentary vote on the Holocaust denial legislation.
Protesters Disrupt Israeli Film Festival in Paris
A group of anti-Israel protesters interrupted the opening of Paris’ 10th annual Israeli film festival.
On Tuesday night, about 30 pro-Palestinian protesters burst into the Paris theater hosting the opening to this year’s annual Israeli film festival.
Protesters handed out fliers on the street outside the Gaumont Opera Theater asking people to boycott the event and the “scandalous presence” of Israeli Culture and Sports Minister Limor Livnat, who inaugurated the festival.
“We ask you not to show your approval of this event, under the guise of culture, which serves merely to comfort a crushing machine for the Palestinian people,” the fliers said.
Police quickly removed the protesters from within the theater, which was only open to invited guests Tuesday.
The film festival runs from March 10 to 16, and features many films never screened outside of Israel.
Spanish Bookstore Owner Jailed for Justifying Genocide
A Barcelona bookshop owner was sentenced to prison for the crime of “honoring and justifying genocide.”
Pedro Valera, owner of the Europa bookshop, was given a term of two years, nine months for “selling and spreading in a continuous manner books that honor and justify the genocide committed by Hitler against the Jewish people and other minorities.”
The sentence, which was handed down Monday in a Barcelona court, also accused the bookshop of marketing “books that belittle other races or ethnicities, women, homosexuals and disabled people,” as well as organizing neo-Nazi conferences.
Valera also was fined nearly $4,000.
“I am not saying there was not persecution of the Jews, but so far nobody has found these famous bars of soap into which they were supposedly transformed,” an unrepentant Valera said during the trial. “And I doubt the numbers of the dead would reach the mythical 6 million.”
While Holocaust denial is not punishable by imprisonment in Spain, justifying it is. The Constitutional Court ruling was implemented in 2007 following the suspension of a five-year prison sentence against Valera on the grounds that imprisonment for Holocaust denial is “unconstitutional.”