An Austrian court has ruled that the convicted British Holocaust-denier, David Irving, should be released from prison and serve the remainder of his three-year sentence on probation.
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British historian David Irving sentenced to three years in prison in Austria for denying Holocaust; earlier, Irving pleaded guilty to the charges but insisted he now acknowledges killing of Jews |
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The appeals court in Vienna decided to reduce the sentence on Wednesday, imposed in February, to one year of mandatory imprisonment with two years on probation.
The ruling means Irving should be freed as he has already served 13 months in jail, after being arrested in November 2005.
A court in September had upheld Irving's conviction, levied after a one-day trial on February 20 at which he pleaded guilty to a charge dating from 1989 of denying the Holocaust of European Jewry.
But Irving had insisted that he no longer questioned the existence of gas chambers at the Nazi's Auschwitz concentration camp.
Irving was also on trial for saying the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews was not the work of the Nazis, but of "unknown" people who had dressed up as storm troopers, and that Adolf Hitler had in fact protected the Jews.
He was found guilty on all three denial counts by an eight-person jury.
Irving was prosecuted under an Austrian law targeting those who "deny the genocide by the National Socialists or other National Socialist crimes against humanity."
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