Criminalising history – Edinburgh Court orders Vincent Reynouard’s extradition

[This article is also available in Spanish – Este artículo también está disponible en español.]

[And also now in German – auf Deutsch.]

Today an Edinburgh judge took a step towards criminalising historical revisionism in the UK, when he ordered the extradition of the French scholar Vincent Reynouard, whose ‘crime’ is to have made videos and written books questioning aspects of Second World War history. The detailed judgment by Sheriff Chris Dickson (against which an appeal is likely to be made) amounts to a shocking assault on academic freedom.

[American readers might be confused by the judge’s title: in Scotland a “Sheriff” is a judge in the lower courts, not a police official.]

As regular readers will know, Vincent has been imprisoned in Edinburgh since November 2022, despite there being no UK law against historical revisionism. He has repeatedly been dragged into court for extradition hearings, in a courtroom normally used for terrorist murderers and gangsters.

In most of Europe, there are laws of various kinds that imprison scholars for questioning the alleged homicidal ‘gas chambers’ or other aspects of ‘Holocaust’ history. In some countries – such as France – ‘nazi crimes’ completely separate from the ‘Holocaust’ are also protected from historical investigation.

But in the UK, Parliament has chosen not to introduce any such law.

Zionist lobbyists have therefore used other laws to criminalise historical revisionism indirectly (including the racial incitement provisions of the Public Order Act, plus a section of the Communications Act that was originally drafted to deal with people who use the telephone for harassment and indecency).

In the present case, French prosecutors had at first obtained Vincent’s arrest so that he could be extradited to serve a 12 month prison sentence that had been upheld by a French appeal court in 2015. This sentence was imposed under the ‘Gayssot Law’, originally introduced to criminalise the eminent revisionist Professor Robert Faurisson. Communist politician Jean-Claude Gayssot and millionaire Jewish socialist Laurent Fabius joined forces to bring in a law that makes it illegal in France to question the decisions of the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

No other area of history is protected in this fashion by French law.

The 2015 sentence condemned Vincent for two online videos in which he raised questions about the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau and described the ‘Holocaust’ as a myth.

As we reported last month, due to the length of time that Vincent has already served in Edinburgh jail while awaiting extradition, this initial arrest warrant was dropped.

So today’s judgment was on a second warrant which French prosecutors issued in December 2022 and which was certified by ever-compliant UK authorities (the National Crime Agency) in March 2023. Again each of the offences detailed in this warrant would attract a prison sentence of up to 12 months, and though in theory Vincent would face a trial in France (rather than serving a sentence that has already been imposed), few observers have confidence that justice would be served in the French courts.

This second warrant related to seven separate videos posted online. Some of these videos again questioned the feasibility and historical veracity of ‘gas chamber’ allegations. Others involved the so-called “massacre” in the French village of Oradour in June 1944. Vincent Reynouard has made a particular study of Oradour, and his updated and detailed book on this topic was recently published.

In today’s judgment, Sheriff Chris Dickson ruled that Vincent’s alleged crimes committed in these videos would also be offences in Scotland under the Communications Act, due to being “grossly offensive”. In this sense he accepted the prosecution argument advanced last month (see my earlier trial report). On the other legal point at issue he sided with Vincent’s defence barrister, Fred Mackintosh KC, in rejecting the notion that the videos could amount to a “breach of the peace” by threatening “serious disturbance to the community” and causing “alarm to ordinary people”.

Sheriff Dickson’s ruling that the videos were “grossly offensive” and therefore criminal in Scotland (and grounds for extradition) amounts to the most serious assault on academic freedom that any UK court has yet attempted. It was a truly shameful judgment: an infamous day in the UK’s legal history.

In paragraph 38 of his judgment, Sheriff Dickson accepted that “there is no crime of Holocaust denial in Scotland and that a ‘message or other matter’ which consists of or includes Holocaust denial can only be contrary to section 127(1)(a) if it is grossly offence [sic].”

Very oddly, in a blatant dereliction of duty, Sheriff Dickson seems to concede in his next paragraph that he did not study the full content of each video. He does not claim to have any expertise in the relevant historical topics, nor indeed any expertise in historical method generally.

Yet Sheriff Dickson believed himself competent to decide, apparently on the basis of reading only certain extracts from the transcripts rather than weighing their full context, that the videos were “(i) beyond the pale of what is tolerable in our society; and (ii) grossly offensive and that any reasonable person in an open and just multiracial society would find them to be so.”

The Sheriff’s reasoning was (in part) that the videos were “derogatory towards the Jewish people”, though he accepted that Vincent had at no time called for violence against Jews, still less for their extermination.

In fact Sheriff Dickson took the view that “all of the offences specified in the extradition warrant” amounted to gross offensiveness under the Communications Act.

It’s important to look at the precedents on which interpretation of this law rests. The standard precedent, known as the Collins case, involved repeated phone calls made to a Member of Parliament’s office, in which Collins had “ranted and shouted and made reference to ‘wogs’, ‘Pakis’, ‘black bastards’ and ‘niggers’.”

It is in the context of this Collins case that Sheriff Dickson was assessing Vincent Reynouard’s videos, which could not have been more different in content and style. Rather than vulgar and thoughtless abuse, Vincent employed calm and rational analysis. Yet Sheriff Dickson ruled that the following content was “grossly offensive” in the same sense as the Collins telephone calls.

Video 1: suggesting that the deaths at Oradour occurred as the result of an explosion rather than a ‘massacre’ by the SS.

Video 1 (second offence): making a reasoned case as to why alleged ‘homicidal gas chambers’ at Auschwitz-Birkenau did not exist, and describing orthodox historical accounts of this topic as “the official thesis”.

Video 2: arguing that a particular room in an Auschwitz crematorium was not in fact a homicidal gas chamber, as it has been portrayed by other historians; using an on-screen symbol denoting ‘fake’; summarising part of his argument analysing the roof of this structure, with the words “no holes, no Holocaust”.

Video 3: analysing orthodox ‘Holocaust history’ as being, in the words of the warrant, “a belief made up of multiple lies, errors or half-truths that build on each other”; denying that inmates were massacred, and arguing that deaths at the camp partly “attest to the death of hundreds of cripples who could not withstand the transport”; describing the display of hair as though it were evidence of mass killings, as the “most blatant deception”; stating that two buildings referred to by other historias as homicidal gas chambers were actually intended for hygienic purposes; again using the words “no holes, no Holocaust”.

Video 4: with reference to a correspondent’s questions, arguing that “there is a Jewish problem. A problem that Hitler saw clearly”; stating that Jews have exploited society’s flaws and that “it is true that the Jews exploit the situation to dominate us, even enslave us”, but that “to remove them [the Jews] would be pointless”.

Video 5: stating that “revisionism exposes the great lie from which [the Jews] profit”; arguing that the Holocaust myth “imposes a deadly anti-racism for White Europe” and that “this is why Hitler is the most slandered man”.

Video 6: describing stories of Nazi atrocities as being “crude slanders”; suggesting that the Allied victors of the Second World War did not themselves believe in the tales of German homicidal gas chambers.

Video 7: again stating that the Allied victors themselves knew that the tales of mass homicidal gassing were lies circulated as propaganda; suggesting that the confession of Auschwitz-Birkenau commandant Rudolf Höss, used at the Nuremberg trial, was forced from him; “in short, poor Rudolf Höss was treated so that he would say what the victors expected”.

I have quoted these extracts from the judgment at length to emphasise that this was the worst that the prosecutors could say about Vincent. Readers might find this difficult to believe, but it was on the basis of the above extracts that Sheriff Dickson found Vincent’s videos to have been “grossly offensive” communications, and therefore to have been of the same illegal character as the ranting criminalised in the Collins case, the standard test for a Section 127(1)(a) offence. The Sheriff believes that Vincent’s reasoned historical arguments are closely comparable to a man telephoning his MP and emitting repeated abuse about “‘wogs’, ‘Pakis’, ‘black bastards’ and ‘niggers’.”

Adding to this extraordinary judgment, Sheriff Dickson goes out of his way to state that “there would, given the nature of the conduct set out in the accusation warrant, be public interest in prosecuting the respondent [Vincent Reynouard] for that conduct.”

Let us be clear about what Sheriff Dickson is saying here.

He accepts that Parliament has chosen not to bring in any law even vaguely comparable to the French Gayssot Law, or the numerous other European laws criminalising ‘Holocaust denial’.

Yet he has opted to stretch the meaning of ‘grossly offensive’ digital communications, so that serious historical debate (whether or not one agrees with the historical arguments being put forward) can be deemed ‘grossly offensive’.

Sheriff Dickson has ruled in effect that if Jews (or rather the majority faction among Jews) are offended by a historical or scientific argument, Scottish law is obliged to regard expression of that argument as grossly offensive and therefore warranting a prison sentence.

It is difficult to imagine a more outrageous abuse of judicial power, encroaching on an academic topic well outside the competence of the judge concerned.

The Edinburgh court had accepted early on in the case that it was not a matter for the court to debate whether or not the ‘Holocaust’ occurred. Yet what Sheriff Dickson has now done is to assert that it is the business of the court to impose a historical orthodoxy which must be obeyed by all Scottish citizens (and by extension all UK citizens) on pain of imprisonment.

One wonders how Sheriff Dickson would deal (for example) with the wartime chairman of London’s Joint Intelligence Committee, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, who is 1943 dismissed the earliest Holocaustian tales of mass gassings as propaganda. Cavendish-Bentinck criticised Allied propagandists for “publicly giving credence to atrocity stories for which we have no evidence. … I feel certain that we are making a mistake in publicly giving credence to this gas chambers story.”

Today’s particular case involved a Frenchman, Vincent Reynouard. Yet its implications are chilling for all Britons, indeed all Europeans, who value traditional standards of academic enquiry.

Vincent Reynouard is almost certain to file an appeal against this judgment, and H&D will report on further developments in the case soon. He stands at the frontline in defence of civilised European values against the tyranny of a privileged lobby. True Europeans will be hoping for his eventual victory.