Spain Abolishes Thought Crime Law – Withdraws from Germany’s Holocaust Persecution Alliance

Below report from El Mundo, Madrid, 8-11-2007, p. 3 (translated from Spanish):

Freedom of Expression cannot be denied even to the Nazis

The first sentence given in Spain for the crime of genocide apology will also be the last. Moreover, it will be revoked. The Constitutional Tribunal decided yesterday to decriminalise a presumption that was included in the reform of the Penal Code of 1996. Article 607.2 anticipates punishments of up to two years in jail for whoever, “by any means” diffuses “ideas or doctrines that deny or justify” the Holocaust.

With that legislation, a Barcelona court [Juzgado Penal Nº 3, Judge Santiago Vidal] sentenced a librarian [Pedro Varela] in this city in 1998 who distributed and commercialised pro Nazi books and videos. Against the prosecution’s criteria, the Catalonian Court of Appeal [Audiencia Provincial, three judges] posed the question of unconstitutionality, when considering that the referenced article limits a fundamental right, the right to freedom of expression, since it punishes the diffusion of ideas “without demanding any other element, such as affronts, or inciting to attack groups.”

We are, undoubtedly, before a correct decision of the Constitutional Court that reinforces our system of guarantees. Because, no matter how odious the ideas that justify genocide may appear to us, a free society cannot deny their right of freedom of expression, unless it includes inciting to violence. The opposite would be to reinstate the crime of opinion.

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