Le
Pen is step closer to facing "Holocaust"
trial By
Toby Helm, EU Correspondent, in
Brussels THE
EUROPEAN Parliament
yesterday stripped Jean-Marie Le
Pen, the French National Front leader,
of his immunity from prosecution, opening
the way for him to be tried in Germany for
dismissing the Nazi gas chambers as a
"detail of history". After
acrimonious exchanges in which the
70-year-old nationalist claimed his right
to freedom of speech was being challenged,
Euro-MPs voted 420 to 20 to suspend the
legal protection he enjoys by virtue of
being a member of the Brussels and
Strasbourg assembly. Their
decision set the stage for M Le Pen to be
tried in Bavaria for inciting racial
hatred -- a crime that carries a maximum
five-year prison sentence. "I'm
not surprised," said M Le Pen. "It was a
political vote. Almost the whole of the
parliament is Europhile... it wanted to
settle accounts with the president of the
National Front, a patriotic movement which
prefers its motherland, France, to Europe
and its lobbies." Asked
whether he would answer a German summons,
M Le Pen said he had not made up his mind,
but would request "diplomatic guarantees"
if he did "to
avoid being subjected to the fate of
thousands of people jailed in Germany for
their opinions". M
Le Pen caused outrage last December when
he made the remarks at the launch in
Munich of a book Le Pen, the rebel -- the
National Front, a model for Germany, by
the German Right-winger, Franz
Schönhuber. In what many Euro-MPs
believe was a calculated ploy designed to
achieve maximum publicity while on German
soil, M Le Pen told the audience: "I have
said and I repeat, at the risk of being
sacrilegious, that the gas chambers are a
detail of the history of the Second World
War. "If
you take a 1,000-page book on [the
war] the concentration camps take up
only two pages and the gas chambers 10 to
15 lines. This is what one calls a
detail." | Plans
"to avoid being subjected to the fate of
thousands of people jailed in Germany for
their opinions..."
Immediately
after yesterday's vote in the Strasbourg
Parliament, the public prosecutor's office
in Munich, which had requested Euro-MPs to
consider lifting his immunity, said it
would begin preliminary proceedings to see
if the case should come to court. An
official said lawyers would interview M Le
Pen soon. Before
the vote, M Le Pen denounced his many
critics in the Parliament and insisted he
had never denied nor minimised the Nazi
Holocaust against the Jews. He said: "The
question that should be asked is whether
Le Pen had the right to express himself on
the gas chambers. I am against tailor-made
thinking. Referring
to his father's death, he added: "I am one
of the victims of this war. It ruined my
family." Last
month the Parliament's comnuttee on rules
of procedure recommended that the 626
Euro-Mps should lift M Le Pen's immunity,
arguing that under German law he had a
case to answer. But M. Le Pen won strong
support from a fellow National Front
member and French Euro-MP, Bruno
Gollnisch. who
told the committee that more and more
historians now believed gas chambers had
not existed in concentration
camps. M
Gollnisch, a
university lecturer
who, like M Le Pen, sits as an independent
in the Parliament, said: "People have
visited gas chambers in the concentration
camps where they are now known not to have
existed." He
maintained that because M Le Pen's father
was tortured by the Germans, the lifting
of his immunity would mean
"a
child of a victim will be tried by the
children of the
torturers". M
Le Pen currently faces being barred from
public office in France for two years for
throwing punches at a Socialist woman
politician last year. A ruling on his
appeal against the bar is due on Nov
17. In
1987, he
was fined almost
£150,000
in a French court for "vulgarising the
persecution and suffering inflicted on
deportees, and particularly on Jews and
gipsies, by the Nazis" |
The
consequences of this vote for Jean-Marie
Le Pen are serious. In Germany there is no
consitutional First Amendment protecting
free speech in this case.
Experience shows that the German courts,
particularly those in Munich, will not
allow his lawyers to stage a realistic
defence. Unquestionably the French
authorities will allow his extradition.
The German prosecutors will demand a
suspended prison sentence, a heavy fine,
and the most abject and grovelling
apology, and if he is found guilty, a
promise not to repeat the offence; he will
be fined a multiple number of
Tagessätze (daily units), each
unit being his estimated daily income (and
Le Pen is a very wealthy man). David
Irving was fined twelve thousand
dollars for offending under the same laws
in January 1993 (he said that the gas
chamber shown to tourists at Auschwitz is
a post-war fake, a statement which the
Poles now admit to be true).
 Le
Pen can expect no mercy, under Germany's
laws, which are designed to protect every
nook and cranny of the wartime Holocaust
story. |
Le
Pen Stripped of Legal Immunity
write to David Irving