Faurisson Convicted of Racial Defamation

On 27 September 2016, Robert Faurisson, emeritus professor of literature at the University of Lyon, was prosecuted before the XVIIth correctional chamber of the High Court of Paris for three alleged crimes: two counts of “disputing crimes against humanity” and one count of “racial defamation” (diffamation raciale).

The two charges of disputing crimes against humanity were dismissed.

Faurisson was convicted, however, of racial defamation, and, in addition to receiving a suspended sentence of four months, is required to pay 9,000 euros: 4,000 as a penalty, 3,000 for damages supposedly suffered by LICRA (the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism), and 2,000 to cover the legal expenses that LICRA incurred in its undertaking to assist the prosecutor.

The statement for which Professor Faurisson is supposed to pay 9,000 euros is from his speech “The Victories of Revisionism,” which he delivered on 11 December 2006 during an international Revisionist conference in Tehran:

“The alleged Hitlerite gas chambers and the alleged genocide of the Jews form one and the same historical lie, which has permitted a gigantic political and financial swindle whose main beneficiaries are the State of Israel and international Zionism and whose main victims are the German people – but not their leaders – and the Palestinian people in their entirety.”

To convict Professor Faurisson of racial defamation, the tribunal must find that the statement pertained to an entire race, and that it was defamatory. The tribunal's verdict stretched the truth arguably on both points.

Faurisson's criticism was said to be racial because it was “not limited to a criticism of the political representatives of the State of Israel or of the Zionist ideology,” but implicated “the Jewish community as a whole.”

Faurisson's statement, however, says nothing about “the Jewish community as a whole,” only about the State of Israel and international Zionism.

It was said that Faurisson's criticism of the State of Israel and international Zionism was defamatory because:

“… the imputation that the Jews exploit an historical lie, about the gas-chambers and the alleged genocide, so as to facilitate a political and financial swindle, is obviously defamatory in character.”

The tribunal's assertion that Faurisson's statement is obviously defamatory (présente à l'évidence un caractère diffamatoire) implies that the tribunal did not consider whether it might be true.

This conviction was immediately appealed.

On the bright side, every time the French Republic prosecutes Robert Faurisson, the propositions that he represents receive additional publicity, and this has been going on for decades:

"At the hearing, Robert Faurisson, age 87, again used the tribunal as a forum to present his Revisionist theories for several hours."(Le Figaro, 27 September 2016)

A separate prosecution, for statements about gas-chambers uttered during an interview on Meta TV in June 2014, was to commence the following day before the same tribunal, according to a communiqué from Faurisson's attorney Damien Viguier.