MCI asks that the denial of the Holocaust be made a crime

The Death Camp Auschwitz, in which between one and two million people were killed, the majority of them Jewish, was liberated the 27th of January, 1945. That day they opened the doors of horror, and the world could contemplate the consequences of the terrible radicalism which was the essence of Nazism. The ideological germ of the regime, based on the idea of racial supremacy, was antisemitism, fueled from all areas of the national socialist power and accepted in a society plagued with intolerance. Auschwitz is the irrefutable proof that hate speech always precedes the systematic extermination of human beings.

The Penal Code of 1995 classifies the denial of the Holocaust as a crime; however, in 2001 a case in the Constitutional Court declared this penal code unconstitutional, which made Spain a European anomaly. The immediate consequence was the proliferation of acts of denial organized by Neo-Nazi organizations and the extreme right, who put forth their anti-Semitic and revisionist theories without the consequence of judicial mediation.

Movement against Intolerance calls for the application of the Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA of the Council of November 28, 2008, proposing a tightening of the laws related to crimes of racism, hatred and intolerance in general, in order to neutralize the growth of the Neo-Nazi groups which pose a threat to the security of people belonging to vulnerable groups.

The enduring testimony of Violeta Friedman, an Auschwitz survivor and the honorary president of Movement against Intolerance, demands that memory lives on to put an end to all forms of hate and racism.