When laws treat members of different racial/ethnic/national groups differently, that's a form of discrimination. If there was a genocide against group A, and another against group B, and we say that it is illegal to deny the genocide against group A, but legal to deny the genocide against group B, that is treating group A and B differently. It is going to upset many members of group B, and damage social cohesion. Especially so if the different legal treatment is based on politics rather than principle.
I don't think your case of speed limits is really comparable. Nobody's personal identity is based on a speed limit, those laws – however rational or irrational they may be – are not relevant to personal identity. But genocide denial laws are relevant to personal identity – to racial/ethnic/national/etc identity – since different genocides have different victim groups, and there are people alive today who belong to those victim groups and identify with them, and the victims of a genocide (and their descendants) have a special interest in whether it is legal to deny that genocide.
>If there was a genocide against group A, and another against group B, and we say that it is illegal to deny the genocide against group A, but legal to deny the genocide against group B, that is treating group A and B differently.
That was not the ruling of the court. You are projecting that as the result of the court's decisions, but the court expressly said this was not what their ruling meant. Then you are assuming a motive based off that projection.
You are effectively pointing to one court case in which a woman was found innocent of murder and one in which a man was found guilty of murder and concluding that the system is obviously gender biased against men. My argument is not even necessarily that you are wrong, my argument is that you can't draw this conclusion from these two cases.
Well, I am not the only person who draws the conclusion that the ECHR judgement sets up a morally dubious hierarchy of genocides, in which the memory of the Holocaust is viewed as more worthy of protection than the memory of the Armenian genocide, and in which the threat of antisemitism is taken more seriously than that of anti-Armenianism. Here is a law professor making the exact same criticisms (Professor Uladzislau Belavusau at the University of Amsterdam): https://www.echrblog.com/2015/11/guest-commentary-on-grand-c... and also https://verfassungsblog.de/armenian-genocide-v-holocaust-in-...
Similar criticisms have been voiced by Ariana Macaya (law professor at the University of Costa Rica): http://www.qil-qdi.org/focus-sur-perincek-c-suisse-la-questi... (she writes in French, but if you can't read French, Google Translate does a pretty good job of it)
It is odd to accuse me of "projecting" in my criticism of a court decision, when law professors express essentially the same criticism. Are they projecting too?
I can point to legal experts who have a different conclusion.[1] Your linked experts are not inherently more right than mine.
Would you acknowledge that there is something more incendiary about a member of the German Parliament denying the Holocaust in an official Parliamentary speech compared to a foreign national denying the Armenian genocide in Switzerland where the Armenian population is estimated to be 3k-6k? That is the primary conclusion of the ECHR. There is no justification for extrapolating that out to the idea that every instance of denying the Holocaust is worse than any instance of denying the Armenian Genocide which appears to be your conclusion.
I don't think your case of speed limits is really comparable. Nobody's personal identity is based on a speed limit, those laws – however rational or irrational they may be – are not relevant to personal identity. But genocide denial laws are relevant to personal identity – to racial/ethnic/national/etc identity – since different genocides have different victim groups, and there are people alive today who belong to those victim groups and identify with them, and the victims of a genocide (and their descendants) have a special interest in whether it is legal to deny that genocide.