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SPEECH CRIMES AND FRANCE
By Timothy Garton Ash
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-gartonash-global-speech-20120119,0,6619238.story?track=rss
Jan 19 2012
Denying genocide may be ignorant, but the French government shouldn't
criminalize it.
On Monday, the French Senate is scheduled to debate and possibly vote
on a bill that would criminalize denial of the Armenian genocide of
1915, along with any other events recognized as genocide in French
law. The bill has passed the lower house of Parliament. The Senate
should reject it, in the name of free speech, the freedom of historical
inquiry and Article 11 of France's pathbreaking 1789 Declaration of
the Rights of Man and Citizen ("The free communication of ideas and
opinions is one of the most precious rights....").
The question is not whether the atrocities committed against the
Armenians by the Ottoman Empire were terrible, or whether they should
be acknowledged in Turkish and European memory. They were and they
should be. The question is: Should it be a crime under the law of
France, or other countries, to dispute whether those terrible events
constituted a genocide, a term used in international law? And is the
French Parliament equipped and entitled to set itself up as a tribunal
on world history, handing down verdicts on the past conduct of other
nations? The answer: No and no.
The bill also would criminalize "outrageous minimization" of the
Armenian genocide. As Francoise Chandernagor of the Liberte pour
l'histoire campaign points out, this introduces a concept vague even
by the standards of such memory laws. If Turkish estimates of the
Armenian dead run at 500,000 and Armenian estimates at 1.5 million,
what would count as minimization? 547,000? And should the Turkish prime
minister be arrested for such "minimization" on his next official
visit to France? (The bill envisages a fine of 45,000 euros and up
to a year's imprisonment.)
Taking a benign view of human nature and French politics, you might say
that this is a clumsy attempt to realize a noble intention. That would
be naive. There is a remarkable correlation between such proposals in
the French Parliament and national elections, in which half a million
voters of Armenian origin play a significant part. What happened to the
Armenians was recognized as genocide under French law in December 2001,
just before presidential and parliamentary elections. A bill similar
to this one was passed in the lower house in 2006 (but rejected by
the upper) in the run-up to the 2007 elections.
And what's happening this year? Yes, elections.
Not that all leading politicians of President Nicolas Sarkozy's party
have supported the bill. Foreign Minister Alain Juppe opposes it. But
that's because he's worried about the implications for France's
relations with Turkey. The Turkish government's reaction has been
predictably vehement.
Thus a tragedy that should be the subject for grave commemoration and
free historical debate, calmly testing even wayward hypotheses against
the evidence, is reduced to an instrument of political manipulation,
a politician's brickbat.
Meanwhile, Turkish intellectuals who have bravely said that what
was done to the Armenians was genocide are liable to be prosecuted
in Turkey. What is state-ordained truth in France is state-ordained
falsehood in Turkey.
Yet these are increasingly symbolic rather than effective acts. In
a country like France, and with rather more difficulty in Turkey,
the Internet allows people to find those forbidden views anyway.
So this is but the latest instance of a much wider challenge. What
should be the limits and norms of free expression in the Internet age?
And who should set them? These are among the questions being addressed
in a project called Free Speech Debate (www.freespeechdebate.com)
that we have just launched at Oxford University. Among the 10
draft principles we offer for debate, criticism and revision,
one is especially relevant to the genocide controversy. It says,
"We allow no taboos in the discussion and dissemination of knowledge."
Memory laws like the one proposed in France clearly fail this test,
but they are not the only example. In Britain, science writer Simon
Singh had to defend a costly libel action because of his criticism
of chiropractic claims. The Church of Scientology uses its copyright
of the immortal words of L. Ron Hubbard to prevent people seeing the
secrets of the Operating Thetan. (Tip: Search for Operation Clambake.)
This week, the English-language Wikipedia site was blacked out for
24 hours to protest a proposed U.S. bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act,
that, in the current version, would have a disastrous chilling effect
on the free, online dissemination of knowledge.
There are also more genuinely difficult cases. Late last year,
the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity asked
the journals Science and Nature to redact details of a study about
an easily transmitted form of the H5N1 virus, for fear it could be
misused by bioterrorists. And what about AIDS denialism? When endorsed
by former South African President Thabo Mbeki, this resulted, it has
been estimated, in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people who
might otherwise have been properly treated. The "no taboos" principle
needs to be tested against such hard cases.
France's opportunistic, misbegotten bill is not a hard case. It's a
no-brainer. Next week, let the French Senate give an example to the
U.S. Congress in the defense of intellectual freedom.
Timothy Garton Ash, a contributing editor to Opinion, is a senior
fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and professor
of European studies at Oxford University. His most recent book is
"Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name."
Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia will be in conversation with Timothy Garton
Ash, livestreamed on http://www.freespeechdebate.com, at 5 p.m. U.K.
From: A. Papazian
By Timothy Garton Ash
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-gartonash-global-speech-20120119,0,6619238.story?track=rss
Jan 19 2012
Denying genocide may be ignorant, but the French government shouldn't
criminalize it.
On Monday, the French Senate is scheduled to debate and possibly vote
on a bill that would criminalize denial of the Armenian genocide of
1915, along with any other events recognized as genocide in French
law. The bill has passed the lower house of Parliament. The Senate
should reject it, in the name of free speech, the freedom of historical
inquiry and Article 11 of France's pathbreaking 1789 Declaration of
the Rights of Man and Citizen ("The free communication of ideas and
opinions is one of the most precious rights....").
The question is not whether the atrocities committed against the
Armenians by the Ottoman Empire were terrible, or whether they should
be acknowledged in Turkish and European memory. They were and they
should be. The question is: Should it be a crime under the law of
France, or other countries, to dispute whether those terrible events
constituted a genocide, a term used in international law? And is the
French Parliament equipped and entitled to set itself up as a tribunal
on world history, handing down verdicts on the past conduct of other
nations? The answer: No and no.
The bill also would criminalize "outrageous minimization" of the
Armenian genocide. As Francoise Chandernagor of the Liberte pour
l'histoire campaign points out, this introduces a concept vague even
by the standards of such memory laws. If Turkish estimates of the
Armenian dead run at 500,000 and Armenian estimates at 1.5 million,
what would count as minimization? 547,000? And should the Turkish prime
minister be arrested for such "minimization" on his next official
visit to France? (The bill envisages a fine of 45,000 euros and up
to a year's imprisonment.)
Taking a benign view of human nature and French politics, you might say
that this is a clumsy attempt to realize a noble intention. That would
be naive. There is a remarkable correlation between such proposals in
the French Parliament and national elections, in which half a million
voters of Armenian origin play a significant part. What happened to the
Armenians was recognized as genocide under French law in December 2001,
just before presidential and parliamentary elections. A bill similar
to this one was passed in the lower house in 2006 (but rejected by
the upper) in the run-up to the 2007 elections.
And what's happening this year? Yes, elections.
Not that all leading politicians of President Nicolas Sarkozy's party
have supported the bill. Foreign Minister Alain Juppe opposes it. But
that's because he's worried about the implications for France's
relations with Turkey. The Turkish government's reaction has been
predictably vehement.
Thus a tragedy that should be the subject for grave commemoration and
free historical debate, calmly testing even wayward hypotheses against
the evidence, is reduced to an instrument of political manipulation,
a politician's brickbat.
Meanwhile, Turkish intellectuals who have bravely said that what
was done to the Armenians was genocide are liable to be prosecuted
in Turkey. What is state-ordained truth in France is state-ordained
falsehood in Turkey.
Yet these are increasingly symbolic rather than effective acts. In
a country like France, and with rather more difficulty in Turkey,
the Internet allows people to find those forbidden views anyway.
So this is but the latest instance of a much wider challenge. What
should be the limits and norms of free expression in the Internet age?
And who should set them? These are among the questions being addressed
in a project called Free Speech Debate (www.freespeechdebate.com)
that we have just launched at Oxford University. Among the 10
draft principles we offer for debate, criticism and revision,
one is especially relevant to the genocide controversy. It says,
"We allow no taboos in the discussion and dissemination of knowledge."
Memory laws like the one proposed in France clearly fail this test,
but they are not the only example. In Britain, science writer Simon
Singh had to defend a costly libel action because of his criticism
of chiropractic claims. The Church of Scientology uses its copyright
of the immortal words of L. Ron Hubbard to prevent people seeing the
secrets of the Operating Thetan. (Tip: Search for Operation Clambake.)
This week, the English-language Wikipedia site was blacked out for
24 hours to protest a proposed U.S. bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act,
that, in the current version, would have a disastrous chilling effect
on the free, online dissemination of knowledge.
There are also more genuinely difficult cases. Late last year,
the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity asked
the journals Science and Nature to redact details of a study about
an easily transmitted form of the H5N1 virus, for fear it could be
misused by bioterrorists. And what about AIDS denialism? When endorsed
by former South African President Thabo Mbeki, this resulted, it has
been estimated, in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people who
might otherwise have been properly treated. The "no taboos" principle
needs to be tested against such hard cases.
France's opportunistic, misbegotten bill is not a hard case. It's a
no-brainer. Next week, let the French Senate give an example to the
U.S. Congress in the defense of intellectual freedom.
Timothy Garton Ash, a contributing editor to Opinion, is a senior
fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and professor
of European studies at Oxford University. His most recent book is
"Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name."
Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia will be in conversation with Timothy Garton
Ash, livestreamed on http://www.freespeechdebate.com, at 5 p.m. U.K.
From: A. Papazian