Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day027.15 Last-Modified: 2000/07/25 . P-131 Q. Can I ask you to look at the first item in the bundle of documents I gave you? It is a letter from me to The Times dated July 11th 1986. A. Page 1. Q. Am I complaining to The Times that, having reported my deportation from Austria, they have not reported with one line the fact that the deportation has been ruled illegal and the Minister has been ordered to pay compensation? You will see on the following page The Times item that reports this little victory. A. It seems so. Q. The final paragraph of page 3, The Times item, says: "The spokesman for the Ministry of Justice said Mr Irving will be bringing a case for wrongful arrest against the officials involved later this year". So it is not just as cut and dried as you said, is it, deported from Austria? A. Just it occurred and so I refer to it. Q. It occurred and you refer to it. But you then say in the two lines from the bottom that he is banned from entering Australia. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, can I interrupt you again? Do forgive me for doing so. I am not remotely ---- MR IRVING: Interested. MR JUSTICE GRAY: "Impressed" is the word I was going to use, or will be influenced by the fact that you have been banned and deported from these various countries. It . P-132 seems to me I have to make up my own mind. MR IRVING: It very marginally goes to the accuracy of this witness. MR RAMPTON: No. Anyway, Mr Irving was reading from the pleadings and not from Professor Funke's report. I make no capital out of the fact that he is banned. Your Lordship is obliged as a matter of comity not to comment on the deportations, but I much prefer that we make up our own minds, or your Lordship makes up your own mind, in this court whether Mr Irving deserved to be banned, which is quite a separate question. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is entirely the way I intend to approach it. I can see you resent it, but I think you can forget about it, or forget about them, the deportations, for the purposes of this case. MR IRVING: I will say in one line what I would have said about Australia and Canada, my Lord. Banned from Australia is because the labour Prime Minister said I was a bad character. They changed the immigration law to make it possible. Banned from Canada was because of a technical infringement of the Immigration Act. It was nothing to do with the Holocaust denial views. That was what I had hoped to elicits in this particular piece of cross-examination. In paragraph 1.3.2, on page 9, five lines from the bottom, you suggest that my diaries have been . P-133 sanitized for other readers. This is quite a serious suggestion to make in view of the fact that the diaries are before the court. What justification do you have for the allegation that I sanitized the diaries, 20 million words of them, before making them available to the court? A. Of course, this is a judgment, or a value statement, an assessment. There are important phases I did not see, I mean periods of time I did not see. Maybe you did not put something in your diary, and of course, and this is the main point, the things we figured out by other sources with respect to the letter and to the events are not stated there as intense as private things that I am not interested in. So I had to read and make up my own mind by other sources. So in that sense it gives not a full picture of your interaction so far as they are important for the case that is at stake in the court. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I see whether there is a misunderstanding because there may be. Are you, by the use of the word "sanitized", suggesting that Mr Irving has manipulated or redacted, and I am not sure what the redacted is, the diaries? "Redact" is a very curious word. A. I would say of course all diaries are redacted in the mind of the people and, with respect to what is at stake here, they are of course, I would say, redacted. Look at the Halle event, so you see a full scale different picture. . P-134 Q. I follow that. What I am trying to get at, and I cannot quite think of the right term, is are you suggesting that Mr Irving has deliberately altered the diaries after the event in order to present a different picture from what would originally have been given? A. I did not say this. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that perhaps was a misunderstanding. MR IRVING: I could not let that pass, my Lord. I had to draw attention to it, and also the following phrase that I have to draw attention to is four lines from the bottom: "As will be set out below important passages in Irving's diaries have not been released to the defence". What basis do you have for making that allegation that implies that I have withheld documents on discovery? A. It implies that you did your diary, and all of a sudden interrupted your diary. Because of this assumption, there are left out very interesting phases in the course of your activities in Germany and Austria. In Germany. Q. You do accept that the way either you have expressed yourself or the way it has been translated into English, it gives the impression that I have had these pages of diaries and that I have taken them out of the file. A. I cannot say this. Q. I have said I am not going to give them to the defence lawyers. A. No, I cannot say this. I cannot say that you did . P-135 something deliberately against ---- Q. Because that would actually be a contempt of court and, if I was to do that, I would be culpable. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Not suggested. MR IRVING: Not suggested. On the following page, two lines down, you make the same suspicion that I have not disclosed crucial speeches. Are you just saying again that I did not transcribe them, or that I did transcribe them, or I did have tapes and did not make them available to the lawyers? It is the same question. A. Again, it is not a deliberate assumption, assumption of deliberativeness, that it was done deliberately. I cannot say this because I have no proof of it, so I will not. But, of course, there are crucial speeches not there. One of them we will get in the next hour or so. Q. Yes, because, of course, if I had edited the diaries or the speeches, then I would have taken out the little racist ditty that Mr Rampton thinks I should be horse whipped for. MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is not suggested you have doctored them. MR IRVING: You refer in paragraph 1.3.3, which is page 10, and I think this is a useful place to take it on, to the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which has been busy monitoring extremist organizations, as you describe. Now, can you explain to the court what the structure of the OPC is? There is an overall Federal . P-136 body, is there not? A. Yes. Q. And each of provinces has its own provincial OPC. Is it a political body? A. No, it is a state institution on the Federal level and on the provincial or state level the like. They have their duty, according to the constitutional law and to various laws that were given by the parliament, to observe extremism of my kind, to monitor, and this is the main function. Q. Yes, but it is a body that in each case, both at Federal level and at provincial level, is subordinated to the Minister of the Interior, who is a political animal, is he not? He has the say? A. I have to reiterate what I said. It is not a political body. They have to stick to the rules. I do not know, it goes with the idea, and to a degree realized idea, that state officials stick to the rules, stick to the laws, and are not politicisable. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I am wondering whether this is not in a way a bit similar to courts in foreign countries making decisions that you be deported and banned and so on. I do not think I am really very concerned, am I, with the views or activities of the OPC? MR IRVING: You are, my Lord, if I may respectfully say so, because much of his report depends on the reports provided . P-137 by the OPCs. He quotes them extensively as though they are the word of God. If I can establish to the court's satisfaction that the OPCs are political animals created, run and generated as propaganda instruments by the government agencies and the government ministers concerned, which is why they never criticise the activity of the established parties, even when they are unconstitutional, and demonstrably so, then this would devalue whatever these people have to say about unfortunate people who come under their magnifying glass. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I suppose that is right. MR IRVING: Let me just put to you, Professor Funke, a decision of the constitutional court in Germany, that, when the OPC ruled that a party was right-wing radical or right-wing extreme, or was an enemy of freedom, and I will give you the German in a moment, and a danger for the liberal democratic basic order, then this was a value judgment which the Federal Minister of the Interior was uttering in pursuance of his constitutional duty to protect the liberal democratic basic order. I will say it to you in German now (German read from document not provided). In other words, this is a statement of the Supreme Court in Karlsruhe, which states that it is purely the opinion of the minister when he decides that a party is right-wing extreme or not. A. Can I see it? . P-138 Q. It gives the actual source. I have highlighted it in yellow for you. The footnote is the source. A. Thank you. Q. The point is that such statements defining people as right-wing extreme are the opinion of the minister, a value judgment and not a statement of fact. A. Things are a bit more complicated. That is why I do not know, this is also important for this context, I do not know the context of what is said here. So there are different levels of decision-making processes of the BundesVerfassungsgerichte, the highest court in Germany. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I really do feel, I am sorry again to interrupt you, Professor Funke, this is not going to help. We are getting terribly ---- MR IRVING: Into detail. MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, on the contrary. I think what counts is really what these individuals and parties have said and done. I take your point, which is why I did not stop you, that the views expressed by the OPC probably do not count for a huge amount, but I do not think we want to go into a detailed analysis of what the German Supreme Court has said about the way in which the OPC performs its function. That is what I am really getting at. MR IRVING: I would hope that you would attach more value to the opinion of the German Supreme Court than to myself in this matter. . P-139 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure that really either in a sense is particularly material. That is no criticism, obviously, of either of you. MR IRVING: As long as your Lordship bears this in mind when we come to judgments on these bodies and people uttered by the OPCs and I may remind you of it. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am more interested in Professor Funke's own view rather than a reflection of somebody else's. MR IRVING (To the witness): Professor Funke, lower down on page 10, paragraph 1.3.4, you say that some of your sources are what I would consider anti-fascist? A. This is a very interesting point. Q. Well, briefly, please? A. Yes, briefly. I had to rely for the insider report that was done after the Michael Schmidt film on a source that was given by an anti-fascist so-called, self-described anti-fascist group, and that is because these groups, and I met them personally to be sure that I get the data right, these groups are near to this right-wing extremist scenery. So, in a given moment, for a special question, I had, for example, to identify one of these persons, I had to go to these sources, but I never, by each person are restrained to these sources. So I checked them double or triple to make a good judgment. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
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