A convicted Holocaust denier who worked as a private tutor in Fife while hiding from the French authorities must be extradited, a sheriff has ruled.
Vincent Reynouard, 54, was told he will be returned to his homeland to stand trial on charges including “public trivialisation of a war crime” and “public incitement to hatred.”
The French citizen has been trying to avoid extradition since being found in Anstruther in November 2022.
His lawyers argued UK law only allows people to be sent back to their homeland if there is an equivalent British crime to the one the foreign state plans to prosecute.
Defence advocate Fred Mackintosh KC argued there is no equivalent law in Scotland to Holocaust denial.
However, Sheriff Chris Dickson, who heard the case in Edinburgh, concluded Reynouard could be extradited to France.
Incriminating video
In a written judgement explaining his decision, Sheriff Dickson wrote about how Reynouard published a video on a website which was called “Jewish Problem: What Solution?”
Sheriff Dickson wrote Reynouard could be heard saying: “There is a Jewish problem – a problem that Hitler saw clearly.
“But I take my thinking further and say that by exploiting the flaws in our society the Jews are revealing them.
“They are the revelators of our own shortcomings. In other words if our societies have a Jewish problem it is because they suffer from a dysfunction at the beginning…
“It is true that the Jews exploit the situation to dominate us, even to enslave us.
“But by doing so, they reveal our own deviances and give us possibility to solve them.
“Therefore, to remove them would be pointless.”
Sheriff Dickson concluded Reynouard’s “grossly offensive” comments would constitute an offence under Scots law.
He wrote: “I accepted that the respondent did not call for the extermination of the Jewish people… however, I considered that his statements in respect of that video… were nevertheless derogatory towards the Jewish people.
“I considered that these statements taken as a whole were (i) beyond the pale of what is tolerable in our society and (ii) grossly offensive and that any reasonable person in an open and just multi-racial society would find them to be so.
“As regards to the respondent’s intention, I considered that the only reasonable inference that could be drawn was that the respondent intended these statements to be grossly offensive to those whom they relate or was aware that they may be taken so.”
Two-year hunt
Reynouard was apprehended in Anstruther on November 10 2022 on a Trade and Co-operation Agreement warrant.
He is wanted in France as the authorities there believe he is guilty of denying the Holocaust took place – an offence in France.
Reports say Reynouard was using a false identity while working as a private tutor after evading French authorities for two years before being arrested.
His arrest came after search led by France’s Central Office for the Fight against Crimes against Humanity and Hate Crimes.
The investigation began after the memorial of Oradour-sur-Glane, where Nazi troops killed and destroyed an entire village in June of 1944, was vandalised by graffiti which read ‘Reynouard is right’.
Past crimes of Holocaust denial
Reynouard was first convicted of Holocaust denial in 1991.
He was detained after handing out leaflets denying the existence of gas chambers among high school pupils.
In 1997, he was sacked from his job as a maths teacher at a secondary school in Honfleur, Normandy after the discovery of revisionist texts on his computer hard disk.
He was also found giving his students statistical equations regarding the rate of mortality in Nazi concentration camps.
In 2005 Reynouard was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and fined 10,000 Euros by a court for writing a 16-page brochure entitled ‘Holocaust? Here’s what’s kept hidden from you*’.
This was sent to French tourism offices, museums and town halls.
In 2015, he was sentenced to two years in jail by a court in Normandy for denying the Holocaust in a series of Facebook posts.
His most recent conviction came in November 2020 for posting a Holocaust denial video on YouTube.
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