France's top court strikes down law on denial of genocide of Armenians

The French Constitutional Council - the country's highest legal authority - has ruled as unconstitutional a new law which would have made it illegal to deny the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks nearly a century ago. The ruling invalidates a law which President Nicolas Sarkozy was due to sign by the end of February.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said his Cabinet would meet to consider whether to restart economic, political and military contacts with France, which had been frozen after the French Senate passed the law in January. "The correction of this grave error by the highest court in France is satisfying," Turkey's foreign ministry said in a statement. However, minutes after the ruling, Sarkozy's office said he had asked his government to draft a new version of the law which would take into account the Constitutional Council's decision. "The president of the Republic considers that (genocide) denial is intolerable and must therefore be punished," a statement said.

Turkey maintains that no more than 500,000 Armenians died in the conflict of 1914/15, with many of them victims of starvation or exposure, and not targeted killings. The term 'genocide' was therefore an inaccurate term to describe the events. Armenians say that up to 1.5 million of their people were killed deliberately by the Ottoman Turkish Empire.

The council ruled that the law - which would have imposed a €45,000 fine, a one-year prison sentence, or both, on genocide deniers - ran against the principles of freedom of expression written into France's Constitution. French law already considers denial of the Holocaust illegal. Far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen was found guilty of Holocaust denial for saying, in 1987, that the gas chambers of Nazi Germany had been a "point of detail" in the history of World War II.

Senator Hervé Marseille, one of the bill's supporters, argued that since France already recognizes the killings of Armenians as genocide, the same standard that applies to Holocaust denial should apply to that case. "When we contest the Jewish genocide, we can be punished," Marseille was quoted by CNN as saying, adding: "And up until now, when we contest the Armenian genocide, there is no punishment. So we can't have a legal punishment for one and not for the other. Everyone is equal in front of the law."

The Constitutional Council said it was possible to put legal limits on freedom of expression to protect privacy and public order. However, any such law would have to be "necessary, adapted and proportional" to the desired effect, while having the potential for creating a legal precedent.