The European Court of Human Rights is urged to re-examine cases involving Jews after Bostjan Zupancic, one of the court’s longest-serving judges, was exposed for sharing extremist material online.
Bostjan Zupancic, a former European Court of Human Rights judge who worked there for 17 years until 2016, was exposed for having shared extreme antisemitic content on social media. The court now faces calls to re-examine cases involving Jews. Zupancic, who has also been Vice President of the UN Committee Against Torture, shared claims that Jews are „the central enemies of Western civilisation”. He also shared hook-nosed caricatures of Jews commonly seen in neo-Nazi propaganda.
Zupancic also claimed that Jews „introduced… sexual perversions of all sorts… sadism, masochism, lots of homosexuality” before the Nazis came to power. He shared a YouTube video that supposedly revealed the „rise of the Rothschild banking mafia” and an assertion that the „Jewish war on white is behind the arson of the West, and unless Jewish power is named as the cancer, there is no hope for the white race”.
Zupancic’s antisemitic posts grew more frequent and extreme in 2023. One of his posts contained a link to an article that asserted, „Jews are the central enemies of Western civilisation, but far too many self-proclaimed defenders of the West are still blind to the enemy within the gates”. His recent antisemitic posts, which he shared on both X and LinkedIn, were first unearthed by the GnasherJew digital investigative team. Zupancic was temporarily locked out of his account on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, because his posts broke the platform’s hateful conduct rule.
The former ECHR judge adjudicated in numerous hearings that directly affected Jewish communities, including cases involving kosher abattoirs in France, the restitution of property owned by German Jews, an advertising campaign by the Peta animal rights organisation that compared the treatment of animals to that of Jews by the Nazis, and whether the French comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala had a right to express antisemitic views on stage, reports The Jewish Chronicle.
Lord Carlile KC, the former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said: „I would call upon the current court and its member states, such as the UK, to disavow Zupancic’s statements, and I would suggest there should be an examination of the cases on which he sat to ensure that the views he is now expressing did not affect his judgments.”
Jonathan Turner, Chief Executive of UK Lawyers for Israel, backed Lord Carlile KC’s call for the re-examination of cases, saying his organisation was looking into „whether any judgments of the European Court of Human Rights in which Bostjan Zupancic participated should be reconsidered”. After leaving the ECHR in 2016, Zupancic joined the European Centre of Law and Justice (ECLJ). However, the ECLJ now said it was removing him from his role in light of the revelations.
More News
