The Slovakian Supreme Court recently ruled that election materials produced by a far right party back in 2009 did not constitute racist defamation against the country’s Roma. It isn’t surprising that the logic used by the Court has dismayed many.
The case emerged in 2009 when Kotleba ran as an independent candidate for the post of the president of the Banská Bystrica Self-Governing Region, and in his campaign distributed leaflets bearing the slogan “with your support I can surely do away with the unjust advantages for not only gypsy parasites”.
According to the Court, the fact that the Roma in certain contexts may indeed choose to use the word ‘gypsy’ ruled out any problem in the use of that word. And the inclusion of the phrase ‘not only’ clarified that it wasn’t just gypsies Kotleba was accusing of parasitism.
Here is a response to the ruling.
“[The court] did not analyse the whole incriminating statement, the mutual connection between its parts (‘gypsy parasites’) and its objective consequences in the form of defamation of an ethnic group,” the statement reads, adding that the court’s analysis overlooked the public activities of Kotleba and that the organisations he had established and that he is a member of are widely known and offer sufficient evidence of “his real intentions”.
But this kind of painstaking analysis of such a lamentably cloth-eared ruling shouldn’t really be needed.