France’s parliament will debate a law making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide, as Turkey warns that its booming economy gives it the capacity to hurt companies such as Airbus SAS and Electricite de France SA.

Lawmakers will start discussion today of a bill that would punish denial of any genocides recognized by French law with up to a year in prison and a 45,000-euro ($59,000) fine. The measure, presented by a member of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, has been rewritten to remove direct references to Turkey and Armenians. The French parliament voted in 2001 to recognize the World War I killings of Armenians as genocide. In 2006 the lower house voted to criminalize its denial, though the bill failed to get through the Senate five months later.

Turkey says the World War I-era killing of Armenians in the then-Ottoman Empire wasn’t genocide, and its politicians and business leaders have pressed France to drop the bill, and warned of economic consequences if it doesn’t.

“My feeling is that the French political system is not looking at the correct situation,” Volkan Bozkir, head of the Turkish parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said on Dec. 20 after a two-day visit to Paris alongside representatives of the country’s top business groups. Instead of citing the examples of 2001 and 2006, he said, “they should look at Turkey today and make the correct calculation.”