“Non-recognition or promotion of these crimes… is not an exercise in freedom of expression but a blatant disregard of the final judgements of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)…It is a serious insult to the souls of those who lost their lives during that period, as well as a cause of renewed pain for the families of the victims who are still alive today.” 

It is in those terms that the Ministry of Justice responded to an opinion piece written by David Hutt and published by Radio Free Asia. A research fellow at the Central European Institute of Asian Studies and a Southeast Asia columnist of the international current-affairs magazine The Diplomat—Hutt described the recent law adopted by the National Assembly on Feb. 18 and criminalizing the denial or trivialization of the Khmer Rouge crimes as a politically-motivated infringement of freedom of expression for the benefit of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP).  

The Ministry of Justice pointed out that similar laws are in place in at least 17 European countries, criminalizing the negation of the Holocaust or other crimes against humanity, some of those laws providing for prison sentences of up to 10 years. 

It is worth recalling that, in France in particular, the law voted on July 13, 1990, to put an end to the spread of negationist theories and to sanction those supporting them had not failed to stir up controversy. With this law, the denial of crimes against humanity committed during World War II and recognized by the international justice has become a crime. 

Beyond the deniers themselves and the French far right, criticisms were heard within France’s National Assembly and Senate as well as among French intellectuals and historians, mentioned the magazine Canope.                 

Two positions demonstrate the difficulty of attempting to solve negationism through legislation, the French newspaper Le Quotidien de Paris said in an editorial on May 9, 1990. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, followed by other historians, is speaking out against this law as, according to him, it is not within the tribunals’ purview to define historical truth: It is historians’ and honest people’s business, the editorial stated. The act of punishing the expression of revisionism will only transform those people into martyrs, the editorial read.   

In contrast, for the attorney Serge Klarsfeld who is involved in a militant action in favor of the recognition of the Shoah [the genocide of European Jews during World War II], of bringing its actors to justice and defending the victims of persecution, this law is essential. Historical negationism has to do with a propaganda character and causes sentimental prejudice to those who lost people close to them in the Nazi Germany’s extermination camps, he said. Those who are against this law don’t live among survivors and don’t hear their screams, Klarsfeld added.

Freedom of expression versus truth set by law and the respect of the victims of genocidal crimes: This is how the debate around the judicialization of negationism was framed.

Beyond knowing whether justice is the only one that can establish what one calls truth, if freedom of expression amounts to having the freedom of saying established untruths, we are entering a danger zone in the era of the triumphant artificial intelligence and social media.  

Beyond the decisions of the ECCC, the reality of the Khmer Rouge genocide has been written in the blood of the 2 million victims and still tears survivors’ hearts apart.

It would be a crime against humanism that freedom of expression would serve to erase it.