CoR Plenary (June 2022)

The Holocaust ('Shoah' in Hebrew) – the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and mass murder of Jews, whom the Nazi regime and its collaborators sought to annihilate along with other persecuted groups, such as Roma and Sinti – took place in Europe. It is therefore not surprising that a trend to address negationism – i.e. unfounded theories questioning certain historical events – by means of criminal law, originated in Europe. With time, the scope of criminalisation has been extended to cover not only the Shoah, but also other internationally recognised crimes. Such prohibition is, however, not without controversy as it may interfere with fundamental rights, such as freedom of expression and academic freedom. The Council of Europe has played a major role in addressing Holocaust denial, in particular through the case law of the European Court of Human Rights pertaining to the limits of freedom of expression. The Court has consistently excluded negationism from the protection of the European Convention on Human Rights, pointing to the antisemitic nature of the prohibited statements and qualifying them as abuse of rights. In the European Union, a 2008 Framework Decision on racism and xenophobia sought to align national legislation on historical denialism. Yet, national laws still differ in many respects, such as the definition of offences and the range of historical events, the memory of which they serve to protect. This Briefing looks at criminal provisions in 17 selected EU Member States.

Yiddish is a language once spoken by Jews in an area spreading from Alsace to the Urals, influenced by and influencing local languages and cultures. It neared extinction in the 20th century when it lost the majority of its speakers, mostly – but not only – through the Holocaust. Yiddish is part of European folk culture, contributing to the works of great writers and musicians and broadening European culture more generally. Successive waves of Jewish migration provoked by poverty, persecution, pogroms, Stalinism and Nazism, war and all forms of antisemitism, have drastically reduced the Jewish population across Europe and, with it, the number of Yiddish speakers.

When the Nazis grabbed power in Germany, they had clear ideas about what art is. The persecution of Jews allowed them to seize Jewish property, forbid Jews from running art galleries, push them out of their countries to exile, and send them to camps and death. All this enabled some prominent Nazis to start their own art collections. However, most of the looted valuable classical artworks were destined for existing or planned museums. Nazis and their collaborators looted art collections and moved them from annexed or occupied countries most often to Germany and Austria. This helped trade in looted art flourish not only in Paris but also in the United States [...] More than 50 years after WWII, to address the fact that the owners of many artworks had still not been identified, the international community adopted the Washington Principles, the Vilnius Forum Declaration and the Terezin Declaration, as a signal that progress towards resolving this difficult task requires museum searches and international cooperation. The aim is to help the few Holocaust survivors still alive, or their heirs, retrieve their artworks. Restitution of cultural property looted by Nazis and their collaborators is not only an act of justice. It is also a gesture of recognition of the Jewish contribution to flourishing cultural and artistic life in Europe.

Racial and ethnic minorities face discrimination and its consequences on a daily basis. The exact scale of the problem is hard to gauge due to a lack of data and general under-reporting of racist incidents. The coronavirus pandemic has seen a major increase in reports of racist and xenophobic incidents, and the crisis it triggered has had a disproportionately large negative effect on racial and ethnic minority groups, in the form of higher death and infection rates. Although since 2000 the European Union (EU) has introduced legislation to combat racial and xenophobic discrimination, the problem persists, with the need for new measures recently highlighted by the global Black Lives Matter protests. A number of studies also point to the cost of racial discrimination not only for the individuals concerned but also for society as a whole.

Discrimination based on racial and ethnic origin is still widespread in the EU. Action to combat racism, xenophobia, antisemitism and related intolerance rests on an established legal framework dating back more than two decades. This includes the Racial Equality Directive and the Council Framework Decision on Racism and Xenophobia.

Antisemitic incidents and hate crimes violate fundamental rights, especially the right to human dignity, the right to equality of treatment, and the freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This report provides an overview of available data on antisemitism as recorded by official and unofficial sources in the EU Member States as well as Albania, North Macedonia and Serbia.

A new wave of growing antisemitism, driven by fringe Web communities, is an increasingly worrying presence in the socio-political realm. The ubiquitous and global nature of the Web has provided tools used by these groups to spread their ideology to the rest of the Internet. Although the study of antisemitism and hate is not new, the scale and rate of change of online data has impacted the efficacy of traditional approaches to measure and understand this worrying trend. In this paper, the authors present a large-scale, quantitative study of online antisemitism. They collect hundreds of million comments and images from alt-right Web communities. Using scientifically grounded methods, we quantify the escalation and spread of antisemitic memes and rhetoric across the Web.

This paper aims at providing a new systemic contribution to research about perceptions of antisemitism/Judeophobia by contemporary Jews in 12 European Union countries. The perspective – the viewpoint of the offended side – has been less prominent relatively in research literature on antisemitism. The data analysis demonstrates the potential power of Similarity Structure Analysis (SSA) as a better theoretical and empirical tool to describe and conceptualize the contents of chosen research issues. After a brief review of some methodological problems in the study of antisemitism, this paper will re-elaborate data first published in the report of the 2018 FRA study Experiences and Perceptions of Antisemitism – Second survey on Discrimination and Hate Crimes against Jews in the EU.