Ottawa thumbs nose at Judge's order to allow David Irving to testify in Canada

"The Minister has not allowed you to return"

LONDON -- The Canadian government has thumbed its nose at a sub-poena issued by a Canadian judge ordering British writer David Irving to appear as an expert witness in Toronto, Ontario, on behalf of beleaguered revisionist publisher Ernst Zündel.

Zündel, subject of a rolling legal onslaught since the early 1980s, is charged with violations of Canada's laws on human rights -- the strictest in the world -- on account of the California-based Internet "Zündelsite" run by Dr Ingrid Rimland.

Canada's Human Rights Tribunal issued an order for Mr Irving to appear before the tribunal.

But the writer, admitted by the District Court of Ontario as an expert witness on Hitler's Third Reich in April 1988, has been banned from Canada ever since he was ambushed in Victoria, British Columbia, in Oct. 1992, and deported on the perjured testimony of Immigration investigator Harold Musetescu. Musetescu left government employment under a cloud at the time of its Heritage Front investigations in 1994.

The Canadian exclusion triggered an avalanche of worldwide bans, effectively shutting the international historian out of other Commonwealth countries (which was why Musetescu was prevailed on by the Canadian Jewish agencies to perjure himself as he did).

To visit Canada Mr Irving now has to obtain ministerial approval -- and pay a £300 fee for applying. If consent is granted, he is also has to repay the $2,000 costs of his (illegal) deportation. Mr Irving, who has visited Canada some fifty times since first invited to appear as star guest on the celebrity TV talk show Front Page Challenge in 1967, paid the fees, when he made his application.

Two days before he was due to fly to Ontario, the Canadian High Commission -- situated in a building just fifty yards down the street from his Mayfair, London, home -- issued a refusal, explaining:

You have not subsequently obtained the written consent of the Minister. . .

Referring to Mr Irving's $22,000 fine by a Munich court in 1991 for "defaming the memory of the dead", the letter also stated:

"It has been determined that this is equivalent to the [Canadian] offence 'Public Incitement to Hatred'.

"Finally . . .there are reasonable grounds to believe that you will commit one or more offences in Canada."

In fact Mr Irving's German Verunglimpfung "conviction" was for stating that the Auschwitz gas chamber shown to tourists is a post-war fake -- a fact repeatedly confirmed since then by the Polish authorities.

Moreover, as lawyers have pointed out, the main error in the Canadian letter is to say that he does not have ministerial consent; that is precisely what he applied, and paid, for.

Mr Irving has protested to the Canadian High Commission:

• You state that the German offence of Verunglimpfung etc., "has been determined" to be "equivalent to the offence of Public Incitement to Hatred." This is not so, and you are aware of the very high standards set by the Immigration Act which require that the conviction shall be for an offence which has an exact equivalent under Canadian criminal code.
• You state that there are reasonable grounds to believe I would commit an offence. No properly constituted court will accept this, given that I have never been charged with any offence on my previous fifty or so visits to Canada, and no requests for me to be so charged are evident in the files of the Attorney-General, which we obtained under your Access to Information Act.

Mr Irving adds:"Your decision is purely political, a violation of the Canadian Charter of Human Rights, and an affront to freedom of speech."