Swiss court overturns conviction of Srebrenica denier

BERLIN (AP) " A Swiss federal court has overturned the racial discrimination conviction of a man who published an article denying the massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995.

The plaintiff, who wasn't identified, labeled the official version of events in Srebrenica a lie in the 2012 article and asserted that there was a massacre, but of Serbs. In 2017, he was convicted by a court in Switzerland's southern Ticino canton (state).

The Federal Tribunal said Thursday it overturned the verdict because, while the average reader would understand the text as "a denial of the genocide against Bosnian Muslims," there was insufficient evidence that the author intended to discriminate. It also cited freedom of speech concerns raised by a previous European Court of Human Rights ruling.