Professor Robert Faurisson's "Sahar 1" appeal hearing in Paris

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

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Professor Robert Faurisson's "Sahar 1" appeal hearing in Paris on May 30, 2007


On May 30, 2007 Professor Robert Faurisson appeared before the 11th 
section of the Court of Appeal in Paris regarding his conviction of 
October 6, 2006 for comments made on the telephone and broadcast on 
Iran's "Sahar 1" satellite television channel.


Professor Faurisson's alleged "offence" was to state in an interview, 
apparently given and transmitted on February 3, 2005, that during the 
Second World War there had never been any attempt on the part of the 
German State at a physical extermination of Europe's Jews.


Professor Faurisson told the court that he did not dispute the fact 
that in the period in question there had been suffering and 
persecution where the Jews were concerned: it was, for example, true 
that one fifth of the Jews living in France were deported. But he 
disputed the war propaganda-based account that has become entrenched 
in the historical record and according to which there existed a 
National Socialist project to exterminate the Jews. On the other 
hand, there had been an attempt to reach a "territorial final 
solution" of the Jewish question, but the word "territorial" was 
always left out by the propagandists, journalists and approved 
historians. The "extermination" argument, for its part, was supported 
by no evidence whatever, either material or documentary: so he 
declared, having conducted, as he put it, a detective-style, rather 
than an academic, inquiry.


Since 1990 the "Fabius-Gayssot Act" has prohibited the public 
expression of such views in France. Between 2000 and 2005 Professor 
Faurisson gave numerous interviews to journalists, amongst whom some 
Iranians, in which he believed he could speak freely: hence his great 
surprise in 2006 at being prosecuted for this one.


The European Court of Human Rights has already had occasion to uphold 
and voice its approval of the "Fabius-Gayssot Act", described by 
Professor Faurisson's barrister Eric Delcroix as an "assault" on the 
French people's rights, in legal terms, an illegitimate, wrongful 
official act and not a law, which the courts could, indeed must, 
refuse to apply.


The core of the professor's defence was that he had expected his 
interview to be broadcast or published only in Iran - most likely in 
translation - a country with a quite different approach to the 
protection of "human rights", and which, unlike France, allows the 
free conduct of historical debate.


No-one has yet answered Professor Faurisson's challenge, first issued 
28 years ago, to produce evidence of an order to kill the European 
Jews, or evidence of any gas chamber used to such a purpose, or even 
an explanation as to how, technically and physically speaking, such a 
programme had been carried out. Instead of an answer, there stands 
the February 1979 ukase of the late Pierre Vidal-Naquet, to which the 
political and intellectual circles wholly subscribe, that no debate 
on the gas chambers' existence can be held, that such questions 
simply must not be put.


The only alleged "gas chamber" ever subjected to official forensic 
examination - that of the Struthof-Natzweiler camp in Alsace - was 
conclusively proved by French authorities not to have been a "gas 
chamber". (The relevant report, signed in December 1945 by the dean 
of pharmacology in Paris, has ever since been suppressed, locked away 
in the military archives.) Yet the French courts take no account of 
such facts when hearing cases under the "Fabius-Gayssot Act".


Last October Professor Faurisson was given a three month suspended 
prison sentence for the telephone interview. At the appeal hearing 
this May 30, the professor and his barrister faced not only the 
public prosecutor and a panel of three judges, but also three hostile 
lawyers, representing three separate "anti-racist" organisations, 
each demanding financial compensation for the harm done to them by 
the professor's brief exposé, to a journalist in a distant land, of 
the results of his historical research.


The public prosecutor asked for the retired professor's suspended 
sentence to be at least doubled, from three months to six, while one 
of the three "anti-racist" lawyers made a request for damages in the 
same amount - ¤5,000 - as awarded in first instance to the others, 
rather than the mere symbolic damages won by his group.


The appeal court's judgment will be handed down on July 4th 2007.