In Belgium,

Court tells denier to visit Nazi camps as part of sentence

it’s against the law to deny the existence of the Holocaust. So when a conservative politician denied it, he was sentenced — to see the historical death camps up close.

A court in Brussels has ordered a former Belgian lawmaker to visit five Nazi concentration camps and write about his experiences as punishment for publicly denying the Holocaust, a crime in Belgium.

Laurent Louis, a far-right politician and self-proclaimed “anti-Zionist,” was convicted of Holocaust denial in 2015 after he wrote blog posts publicly doubting whether Jews were killed en masse in Nazi gas chambers during World War II. He received a roughly $20,000 fine and a six-month suspended prison sentence.

But recently, the Brussels Court of Appeal put the prison sentence on hold and instead ordered him to take one trip per year for the next five years to Nazi death camps, Agence France Press reported.

Following each visit he must write at least 50 lines describing what he saw in the camps and “the feelings he experienced,” according to AFP. He is required to submit the texts to the court and post them on his personal Facebook account, where he has some 50,000 followers.

More than a dozen countries in Europe have passed laws banning Nazism and outlawing various degrees of Holocaust denial. Promoting the Holocaust, minimizing its impact or denying it outright are illegal under a 1995 Belgian law and punishable by fines and prison time.

Louis, who served in Belgium’s parliament from 2010 to 2014, cheered the sentence as a “total victory.”

“All that I have left to do is do the reports from the death camps. No doubt the court recognized my talents as a writer,” wrote Louis, 37, who recently self-published a book on his political views.

During his years in Belgium’s Chamber of Representatives, Louis seemed to take pride in being a political insurgent. He was voted in as a member of the country’s center-right conservative party but was kicked out after a few months. He briefly joined the country’s Islamic party but was booted there after trying to proclaim himself party president. He went on to found the far-right Belgians, Rise Up! movement.

In 2014, Louis accused then-Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo of being a pedophile. He was later convicted of slander and received an eight-month suspended prison sentence.