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First Poland Holocaust law complaint targets Argentina paper
WARSAW, March 3, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – An Argentinian newspaper has become the
first outlet to be targeted by Poland’s controversial new Holocaust law,
after a nationalist group filed a case on Friday hours after the legislation
went live.
The law, which went into effect Thursday, sets fines or up to three years
in jail for anyone ascribing “responsibility or co-responsibility to the
Polish nation or state for crimes committed by the German Third Reich”.
The main aim is to prevent people from erroneously describing Nazi German
death camps in Poland, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, as Polish.
The legislation has drawn widespread international criticism and ignited
an unprecedented diplomatic row with Israel.
Critics, including Israel’s government, have expressed concerns that the
legislation could open the door to prosecuting Holocaust survivors for their
testimony should it concern the involvement of individual Poles in killing or
giving up Jews to the Germans.
On Friday the Polish League Against Defamation (RDI), a non-profit which
is close to Poland’s conservative government, lodged a case under the new law
against the website of Pagina 12, a newspaper in Argentina.
The RDI said the paper had used a picture of anti-Communist Polish
resistance fighters from after World War Two in an article about the Jedwabne
pogrom, a 1941 massacre of more than 300 Jews by their Polish neighbours
during the Nazi occupation.
RDI accused the newspaper and its journalist Federico Pavlovsky of “an
action intended to harm the Polish nation and the good reputation of Polish
soldiers”.
Poland was occupied by Nazi Germany in World War II, losing six million of
its citizens, including three million Jews.
BSS/AFP/GMR/0946 hrs