Le négationnisme étatique judiciaire de l’Holocauste dans la jurisprudence de la Cour Européenne des Droits de l’Homme (Affaire Zăicescu et Fălticineanu c. Roumanie)
State-sponsored judicial denial of the Holocaust in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (Case of Zăicescu and Fălticineanu v. Romania)

Summary/Abstract: The European Court of Human Rights ruled, in its 2024 judgment in the case of Zăicescu and Fălticineanu v. Romania, that the acquittal, in the late 1990s, of two senior Romanian military intelligence officers, convicted after the end of the Second World War for crimes against humanity and war crimes, consisting in planning, organizing, and carrying out massacres and deportations of Romanian Jews, without any reasonable grounds, in a discreet judicial proceeding and with a motivation contrary to International Humanitarian Law and International Criminal Law, as well as to scientifically proven historical facts, represented a form of Holocaust denial and distortion, which resulted in the violation of the right to privacy in conjunction with the right to non-discrimination of Jewish Holocaust survivors and victims of the criminal acts in question. While previous European case law has dealt with Holocaust denial by individuals, and therefore the positive obligation of States to protect the right to privacy and non-discrimination of Holocaust survivors, while maintain­ing a fair balance with the freedom of expression of third parties, where the failures of States were indirect, passive denial, this European judgment constitutes a significant development by sanctioning direct state denial of the Holocaust.

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