Police will not launch criminal proceedings against a Czech member of the
European Parliament accused by a former Czech human rights commissioner
with the crime of denying the Holocaust. Petr Uhl filed a criminal
complaint against the Communist MEP Miloslav Ransdorf in May for saying
that a site in central Bohemia where some 1200 Romany people were interned
during the Second World War was not a "concentration camp".
Experts have reportedly sided with Mr Ransdorf's assertion that the site
at Lety u Pisku was technically an internment camp. Over 240 Romany
children and 85 adults died from disease or abuse in the Czech-run
facility. At least one thousand more later were killed in Auschwitz and
other death camps.
A commercial pig farm was built on the Lety site in the 1970s. This April,
the European Parliament passed a resolution demanding the Czech Republic
remove the farm and replace it with a fitting memorial to the Romany
Holocaust. In debate that followed, MEP Ransdorf said that as a historian,
he knew many "lies" had been spread about Lety, which he said
was not home to a "concentration camp" in the common
understanding
of the term.