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French President Jacques Chirac
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PARIS (AFP/EJP)--- French President Jacques Chirac has ordered a probe into revisionist comments made by the French scholar Robert Faurisson at an Iranian conference on the Holocaust this week, his office said Friday.
Chirac has asked Justice Minister Pascal Clement to open a preliminary investigation into the comments made by Faurisson, a retired literature professor well-known for his revisionist views.
In his speech at the Tehran meeting, Faurisson repeated his theories denying the existence of gas chambers and said that in the past twenty-two years “he had been waiting for someone to show him one of those chambers”.
The 77-year-old Faurisson was given a three-month suspended jail term for Holocaust denial last October over remarks he made on Iranian television.
Iran this week organised a conference on the Holocaust that presented Nazi Germany’s systematic slaughter of six million Jews during World War II as a matter of historical debate, sparking angry condemnation from around the world.
In 1991, Faurisson was removed from his university chair on the basis of his views under the Gayssot Act, a French statute passed in 1990 that prohibits Holocaust denial.
He challenged the statute as a violation of international law but the International Human Rights Committee upheld the Gayssot Act as necessary to counter anti-Semitism.