The following Letter to the Editor was sent to us from South Africa:

Put Holocaust denial in its place by publishing the evidence:

Thank you for the thoughtful article by Franz Auerbach on "hate speech" and the equally thoughtful letter on the same subject by Zunaid Osman (The Sunday Independent, December 10). If, as both writers suggest, our new constitution is to limit offensive speech or "propaganda" or "incitement" or the casting "of suspicion on any religion or belief", then the meaning of such terms will have to be considered very carefully.

For example, how do we define "belief" that needs to be legally protected? Should I be allowed to publicly quote medical opinion that virgin births are just not possible? Not very long ago many in this country believed that the British laced the food of Boer-war concentration camp internees with broken glass. Does such a belief, or the one that the Germans made soap from murdered Jews, need protection by law?

Even though both of these allegations are now widely regarded as "propaganda", they serve as good illustrations. The ban against historian David Irving speaking in this country would have been justified on grounds that his views on the Holocaust (supposedly) spread "hate" and "propaganda". A number of countries, including France and Germany, have introduced explicit legislation making "denial of the Holocaust" a crime punishable with up to five years imprisonment.

Joan Blakewell, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Nuremberg trials (The Sunday Independent, December 3), writes of "the importance of setting the facts straight" and how "with typical thoroughness the Germans had documented and filed the appalling evidence" for "the plan to exterminate the Jews". It is exactly here that the semantics of Holocaust denial are important. For those at which the "Auschwitz lie" laws are aimed do not deny that millions suffered a great persecution nor that many died. What they question is whether there was a plan or order to exterminate the Jews as well as whether the instruments of genocide, the Nazi gas chambers, were ever a reality.

Instead of criminalising "Holocaust denial", why not put the deniers in their proper place by publishing some of this thorough evidence? Much has been written on "traces of the crime" (for example, by French pharmacist Jean-Claude Pressac on behalf of the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation), but what I have in mind is a wartime document with an order to murder Jews or with a plan of a homicidal gas chamber which is labelled as such so that we can understand its modus operandi.

Even the Allies, who broke the German "Enigma" code and who had at the war's end many corpses as well as the remnants of Hitler' "machinery of death" at their disposal to do forensic tests on, may be keeping back essential information.

By publishing such direct evidence, our fledgling democracy could put an end to "revisionism" and have no need to tarnish its image by mimicking France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and others. Unlike Osman, Auerbach makes no reference to this matter, and I would be very interested to learn his and others' opinions on these vexing questions.