Belgium court uses anti-revisionist law

UPI, Fri 10 Nov 2000 A Belgian court has handed a right-wing activist a suspended six-month sentence using for the first time a 1995 law that bans revisionist history.

The 55th chamber of the Brussels court of summary jurisdiction Tuesday handed David Vercruysse a six-month suspended sentence and fined him $863 and as part of the sentence The court published its judgment in two national newspapers, Le Soir and De Standaard, for distributing a booklet that said the Holocaust had been exaggerated.

The case was filed by the Center for Equal Chances and Opposition to Racism, which in 1997 found a Brussels newsstand selling copies of Final Conflict, a British neo-nazi work that had been distributed by Vercruysse. The court studied the 1995 law as similar cases did not exist and because Vercruysse used the freedom-of-speech defense.

"We have foreseen limitations to freedom of speech, more particularly when combating opinions baneful to society," the presiding judge said. "We must avoid Belgium becoming a refuge for revisionism."

The book questioned the genocide of Jews by the Nazis during the World War II. Under the headline "Did Six Million Really Die?," Final Conflict asks what the "fuss" is about.

" . . . It is illegal to ask this particular question. Now, before people start screaming and fainting out in suburbia, let's get one thing straight: Jews did die in those camps and those pictures, for the most part were genuine . . . but where is the crime in seeking the truth? . . . Was it a planned extermination, or were there just too many prisoners at a time when Germany was being overrun by refugees fleeing the Red Army and carpet bombed by the 'Allies' -- and with typhoid and cholera epidemies, was death on a large scale unavoidable?"

The judge said the book minimized genocide perpetrated by the Nazis and reflected hostility toward democracy. Vercruysse said he distributed the magazines, but said he wasn't aware it was illegal to do so.