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"Genocide Denial" Laws as Secular Heresy: A Critical Analysis with Reference to Bosnia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Robert M. Hayden
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Abstract

“Heresy” is developed here as an analytical term for the criminalization of speech questioning the basic tenets of a belief system, such as internal criticisms of state socialism or denial of the applicability of the term genocide to some mass crimes in a European Union that purports to make central the protection of human rights. European legislation to criminalize “genocide denial” is critiqued through a close analysis of international legal decisions dealing with whether “genocide” took place in the Bosnian war of 1992-95. Although granting both the facts as these courts found them and the serious criminality of the actions involved, Robert M. Hayden argues that calling them “genocide” broadens the definition of that term to the extent of losing the possibility of uniform application. Criminalizing “genocide denial” is thus not only contrary to principles of free speech and intellectual inquiry but manifests the same problem that Amnesty International identified in its reports in the 1980s on the vagueness of the “verbal crimes” provisions of the criminal laws of the formerly socialist countries. Hayden concludes that the punishment of heresy is a manifestation of power by a political elite that holds its values and assumptions to be immune from challenge.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , Summer 2008 , pp. 384 - 407
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2008

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References

I am grateful for the comments of Jennifer Cash, Bill Chase, Noam Chomsky, Ilya Prizel, Mark Steinberg, and especially for those of several anonymous reviewers for Slavic Review.

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