Slovak town bans demonstration by fascists out of respect for Holocaust victims

News server Noviny.sk reports that the municipal authority of Trenčín, Slovkia has banned an assembly by the fascist Kotleba-ĽSNS party (“Kotleba – People’s Party Our Slovakia”) which was meant to happen in mid-October. Among other matters, the town’s decision states that the generally-known attitude of the party toward national minorities, people of other races and various social groups could spark public declarations of hatred and intolerance.

Trenčín has also pointed out that one of the representatives of the party has been convicted of intentionally defaming a nation, race or group based on political conviction and the party has never distanced itself from his words. The local authority has based its decision on the case law of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which has stated that “a political party’s agenda and statutes cannot be the sole criteria for assessing its aims and objectives, the content of its program must be comparable to the behavior of the party representatives and the opinions they disseminate“.

The town has also recalled that during the Second World War, when Slovakia became a fascist client state of Nazi Germany, 1 619 citizens of the former Czechoslovakia were deported to the Nazi concentration camps, 1 350 of whom did not survive the Holocaust. “Incorporating ethical and moral standards into administrative decisions moves society from an immature use of the achievements of a democratic system towards a conscious, mature civil society. We hope that this decision will not go unnoticed and that it will help to establish the principle that forces seeking to hurt others in order to achieve their own goals have no place in Slovakia,” Mayor Richard Rybníček said in his statement.