Liberte

While it may only be an attempt by the French Socialist Party to garner Armenian votes in next year's Presidential Elections, the French Parliament passed a Socialist sponsored measure that would make it a crime to deny that Ottoman Turks committed genocide against Armenians. Opposed by the government and the EU, it is unlikely that the measure becomes law, however, it follows similar logic as the crime to deny the Holocaust that exists in many Western European countries: governments legislating belief. Although it seems nonsensical to refute the Holocaust to most, it is hypocritical for a democratic government to actually ban that belief. Such legislation at first blush seems unconstitutional. The pre-amble to the French Constitution, La Déclaration des droits de l'Homme et du citoyen, "liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression" and that the limits of those rights exists only as "the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the enjoyment of these same rights". Denying one the right to refutthe existenceeee of a historical fact or of any belief, however incorrect that belief, violates the basic tenants of natural rights and undermines European democracy.