A Belgian court handed down a unusual sentence on a former politician and Holocaust denier in the country this week: he must visit one Nazi concentration camp every year for the next five years and write about his experiences.
The New York Times, citing local news reports, says that in 2015 the former politician Laurent Louis was handed a six-month prison sentence and a $20,000 fine for breaking the country's laws on Holocaust denial. Louis, described by the American paper as a "far-right gadfly known for making inflammatory statements about Jews", wrote a series of online posts in which he questioned the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust.
He was convicted of violating a law against the "minimisation, justification or approval of the Holocaust".
But an appeals court in Brussels changed the sentence, prompting Louis to release a statement in which he wrote: "All that is left for me to do is to go and report in the death camps...No doubt, the Court has recognised my talents as a writer.”
