Holocaust denier to be extradited after losing legal battle
- Published
Vincent Reynouard was arrested in Anstruther, Fife, after a two-year search by French authorities
A French Holocaust denier who spent two years on the run in Scotland has lost his legal battle against extradition.
Vincent Reynouard was apprehended in Anstruther in November 2022.
The 54-year-old is wanted by the authorities in France where he is accused of inciting hatred and denying the occurrence of the Holocaust.
A warrant for Reynouard arrest in 2022 set out three offences arising from seven videos he posted online between September 2019 and April 2020.
At Edinburgh Sheriff Court last year, the private tutor fought and lost a challenge to sending him back to face prosecution.
His application for leave to appeal has now also been rejected.
Scotland's senior judge the Lord Justice General, Lord Carloway, heard the case with Lord Pentland and Lord Tyre at the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh.
Lord Carloway said: "The denial of the Holocaust is a gross insult to the members of the Jewish and other communities whose members perished in Auschwitz and Birkenau."
He said it was not necessary to be a member of the relevant communities to be "grossly offended by such statements".
He described other statements Reynouard about the Jewish community as "antisemitic racism".
The judge said although it was not an offence to hold such views or to express them in certain contexts, it was a breach of Communications Act legislation to communicate them to the public on the internet.
"This is the modern world in which posting videos on YouTube or social media can have a significant practical and enduring consequence relative to the behaviour of others," he said.
"It is not too difficult, especially in the present climate of tension in several parts of the world, to envisage that a repeated publication of antisemitic, or other racist material could provoke serious disturbance by certain sections of society."
Offensive videos
Lord Carloway also said the seven videos featuring Reynouard amounted to an offence of relative seriousness by Scottish standards.
A French judge had issued a warrant for Reynouard arrest in 2022 after he posted the videos online.
It was said he had trivialised a war crime, challenged the occurrence of crimes against humanity and incited the public to hatred or violence because of origin, nation, race or religion.
In one video Reynouard denied that the 1944 massacre by the Waffen SS at the French village of Oradour took place - where women and children were burnt alive.
He also denied the existence of gas chambers at the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz and claimed the Holocaust was made up of multiple lies, errors or half truths.
He suggested that the corpses found there were not victims of genocide but were hundreds of "cripples" who had not survived transport to the camps.
In one video he stated: "There is a Jewish problem. A problem that Hitler saw clearly."
He went to describe the Nazi leader as "the most slandered man" and said he wanted to "rehabilitate" National Socialism.
For Reynouard it was argued that the videos did not threaten serious disturbance to the community and did not constitute a call to action and that to extradite him would be disproportionate.