Dear USTN members and friends – many of you already sent the USTN’s world’s first action campaign letters in French language to President Sarkozy, French Senate and Embassy in U.S. Now, we are asking you to send letters to your local media – it is just as quick and easy as all USTN letters. Let’s make sure everyone knows about the free speech fiasco in France. As always, USTN helps you safeguard our joint interest and promotes the Turkic cause.
USTN LETTER TO U.S. MEDIA:
A bill recently passed by the French Parliament and awaiting the almost certain signature of President Sarkozy by next week, to become a law, would violate freedom of speech by paving the way to making it a criminal to publicly question events labeled “genocide” in French law. The new law would impose a one-year jail sentence and/or a 45,000 Euro fine on anyone found guilty of “outrageously” questioning or trivializing events defined in French law as genocide and meeting the definition of genocide of the French penal code. Never mind that the term “genocide” was actually coined by the United Nations and requires a UN court to decide whether or not an event merits that description.
France basically overlooks its own democratic traditions, international obligations, and even the European Court of Human Rights, which has repeatedly held that freedom of expression applies not only to inoffensive ideas, “but also to those that offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population”.
But while the French authorities claim the law would implement EU guidelines aimed at combating racist or xenophobic speech that is “likely to incite violence or hatred”, according to Amnesty International, the new bill does not mention such incitement as an element of the types of expression that will be prohibited, and France already has in place legislation which prohibits such incitement. Moreover, other EU members are in no hurry to follow in France’s footsteps to similarly misinterpret the EU guidelines.
The French authorities’ attempt to curtail freedom of expression and its failure to comply with their international human rights obligations show that France undergoes not only a fiscal crisis, but a moral decay and a legal crisis. How lucky we are to live in America, where the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, among with other Constitutional amendments, make such frivolous and baseless law virtually impossible. Lady Liberty indeed deserves to be in U.S., since its country of origin, France, has sold its soul to the special interest – in this case the Armenian lobby, in a scheme “votes-for-stifling free speech”.
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https://ADVOCACY.usazeris.org/link/target/azeri/54Grf4cz.aspx
