Holocaust denial not a human right, European court rules

STRASBOURG, France — Denial of the Holocaust is not a human right, a European court ruled on Thursday, throwing out a complaint by a German neo-Nazi politician.

Udo Pastoers, who served in the local parliament of the northeastern region of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, was convicted in Germany in 2012 after giving a speech in 2010 in which he appeared to cast doubt on whether the Holocaust really happened.

He argued his freedom of expression was violated and his right to a fair trial infringed because the judge at his appeal could not have been impartial as he was the husband of a judge who had convicted him in a lower court.

Udo Pastoers of the extreme right National Democratic Party party attends a news conference after the party’s convention in Berlin on April 5, 2009. (AP Photo/Gero Breloer)

Its judges also ruled by four votes to three that there had been no violation of the right to a fair trial.

It added an independent court of appeal panel with no links to either married judge had ultimately decided on the bias claim and had rejected it.

According to the ECHR, Pastoers in 2010 gave a speech to the local parliament where he stated that “the so-called Holocaust is being used for political and commercial purposes.”

The court said his speech “was a qualified Holocaust denial showing disdain to its victims and running counter to established historical facts.”

Building of the European Court of Human Rights in in Strasbourg, France seen on March 13, 2012. (CC BY-SA Wikimedia commons)

He “intentionally stated untruths in order to defame Jews and the persecution that they had suffered.”

Such statements “could not attract the protection for freedom of speech” offered by the European Convention on Human Rights “as they ran counter to the values of the Convention itself,” it said.