Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-12-12-Speech-1-065"
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"en.20051212.13.1-065"2
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"Mr President, Article 7 states that I cannot speak in the debate. I do not intend to speak in the debate, but Article 7 allows me nonetheless to correct an inaccurate allegation. The third subparagraph of Article 7(8) allows me to speak on the basis of Article 145, and Article 145 gives me three minutes in which to make a personal statement.
If you will allow me, Mr President, and without my speaking in the debate, the outcome of which is, in any case, a foregone conclusion, I should like, as provided for by Article 7, to speak for three minutes on the basis of Article 145 in order to voice my opinion on accusations directed at me personally. Consequently, I am not speaking with reference to the content of the debate, but simply with reference to allegations made about me by some of the speakers. Mrs Bachelot believed she could say – and this is a widespread opinion – that I had spoken in the heart of the university. That is totally incorrect. The remarks for which I have been criticised were made at a press conference organised in the context of my political duties, during which, as another speaker, Mrs Schenardi, said, I answered journalists’ questions, a point that is not seriously disputed. If I do not have the right to give these kinds of answers, then journalists should not have the right to ask questions about the history of the Second World War. That seems quite clear to me, and I did not say those words as an academic even though the academic authorities, by order of the French Government, tried to undermine my presumption of innocence and were condemned for doing so by the Council of State, our highest court.
Secondly, Mrs Berger suggested that I had denied the fact that the concentration camps, and particularly the Mauthausen camp, ever existed. Mrs Berger, I have never denied the fact that the concentration camps existed, and certainly not the Mauthausen camp. The existence of the gas chambers at Mauthausen was denied by Mr Lanzmann, the director of the film ‘Shoah’, and not by myself who, on the contrary, said loud and clear that they existed. I believe that these two clarifications are, Mr President, extremely important. As for any possible recantations and procrastinations by the Commission, I personally played no part whatsoever in this affair. I will point out, as my colleague said, that the President of the French Republic, Mr Chirac, recently asserted that there could be no official historical truth. I question how it is that I can be criticised for remarks that have just been repeated by the Head of State, the head of the judiciary, and how it is that I can have the legal proceedings against me justified on the basis of a communist law, the Gayssot law, which Mr Toubon described as a Stalinist law when it was adopted. It will be interesting to see what Mr Toubon has to say on the subject of my immunity. That is all I had to say to this Assembly."@en1
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