A retired Slovenian human rights judge has faced calls to have his former cases involving Jews and World War II restitution reviewed after his personal Twitter account came to light in which he publicly expresses antisemitic posts and content.
Jewish groups called for the judicial review last week after tweets by the former European Court of Human Rights judge Boštjan Zupančič showed the retired jurist endorsed blatantly antisemitic canards and rhetoric including tweeting racist cartoons of Jews.
A Harvard-educated criminal lawyer who served as a top judge with the ECHR 1998-2016, Zupančič made the majority of the antisemitic tweets under his name in 2023, including posting articles describing the existence of a global Jewish mafia operating an international conspiracy against Western civilisation.
Retweeting one article, Zupančič even outlined how “Jews are the central enemies of Western civilization, but far too many self-proclaimed defenders of the West are still blind to the enemy within the gates.”
Since the tweets were highlighted by The Jewish Chronicle, Jewish groups and legal experts have called for Zupančič’s rulings on cases related to Jews to be reevaluated, including decisions on kosher butchers, reparations to deported German Jews, and the controversial French comedian Dieudonné.
The Strasbourg-based ECHR, which is not attached to the EU, hears cases from its 46 member states about instances where states have contravened human rights obligations. In recent months, the ECHR has been instrumental in frustrating UK attempts at stopping the flow of illegal immigration through the English Channel despite the Court having minimal enforcement powers against national governments.
Following the media revelations, Zupančič was fired from his role at the conservative human rights think tank the European Centre of Law and Justice. Zupančič’s antisemitic tweets were first unearthed by the Open Source Intelligence (OSING) research collective ‘GnasherJew.’
A dual French-Slovenian citizen and a member of the minor French nationalist Union Populaire Républicaine party, Zupančič did not respond to requests for comment regarding the account, though he has deleted the majority of the antisemitic posts.
