Holocaust denier ordered to visit concentration camps

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 the Second World War. 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, including the infamous Auschwitz camp in Poland, 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, a 37-year-old who served in Belgium’s parliament from 2010 to 2014, cheered the sentence as a “total victory” in a series of Facebook posts but offered his apologies to “those who were hurt by my words.”

“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, who recently self-published a book on his political views.

“More seriously, I will abide by the court’s ruling and go and repent every year in a death camp,” he continued. “In addition to being very instructive and very powerful on the human level, this will be an opportunity also to denounce current genocides.”

During his roughly four 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 just a few months amid tension with its leadership.