- A former German Supreme Court justice has come under
fire for saying Holocaust denial should not be banned.
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- "If I were a lawmaker, I would not make Holocaust
denial a punishable offense," Wolfgang Hoffmann-Riem said Wednesday
at a program at the Berlin Social Science Research Center.
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- According to a report in the Berlin Tagesspiegel newspaper,
the retired judge also criticized the state for what he considered an exaggeratedly
tough confrontation with right-wing extremism.
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- German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries proposed a Europe-wide
ban on Holocaust denial during German Chancellor Angela Merkel's tenure
as EU president in 2007.
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- Stephan Kramer, the secretary general of the Central
Council of Jews in Germany, called Hoffmann-Riem's remarks "irresponsible,
coming from such a distinguished expert on jurisprudence." Kramer
told Tagesspiegel that he thought Hoffmann-Riem had given ammunition --
and, unwittingly, also a spokesperson -- to Holocaust deniers, and "not
helped the cause of freedom of expression at all."
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- In the Internet age, debate about the freedom of expression
has increased in Germany, given the fact that Holocaust denial and the
use of Nazi texts and symbols are banned in the country but not elsewhere
-- notably in the United States.
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- Kramer, who has challenged the Internet provider YouTube
to filter anti-Semitic material, told Tagesspiegel he would "hate
to see how bad it would look in Germany if Holocaust denial were not illegal."
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- http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/109417.html
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