A French court on Thursday imposed a fine and a suspended sentence on French university Professor Robert Faurisson for denying the Holocaust.
But then it denounced the very law under which he was found guilty of a misdemeanor.
The Paris Court of Justice further astounded observers by offering a gratuitous critique of the Nuremberg war crimes court.
Faurisson was convicted under a law passed last year that makes it a misdemeanor to publicly contest the reality of an established crime against humanity.
He was the first person tried under the statute. But Faurisson used the court Thursday to propagate the very falsehoods for which he had just been convicted and fined the equivalent of $20,000.
Possibly encouraged by the court’s observation that the new law “limits freedom of speech and of opinion,” he repeated from the dock his allegation that the Holocaust was a hoax devised by the Jews and the State of Israel to “milk” the German people.
Faurisson has been pushing that line for 10 years. Last September, he published it in the far right-wing monthly Le Choc du Mois (Shock of the Month), a magazine linked to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s extreme rightist National Front.
He was sued under the new law by 11 groups of war veterans and former deportees.
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