The Belgian Parliament has enacted a law making it a criminal offense to disseminate Holocaust-denial literature.
Prior to the new legislation, Belgium was, along with Denmark, one of the few Western European countries where the publication of revisionist books was not a punishable crime.
But under the new law, violators may be jailed for up to one year and fined about $160.
According to Yvon Mayeur and Claude Eerdekens, the two Socialist Parliament members who introduced the law, Belgium had become in the past few years a major hub for the spreading of revisionist literature about the Holocaust.
“Regularly, public and school libraries in Flanders were invaded by so-called scientific documents denying the extermination of 6 million Jews by the Nazis,” Mayeur said. “Even the Belgian daily newspapers often received such literature. But no sanction was possible.”
The new law will go into effect March 13, when an official Belgian delegation is scheduled to travel to the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp to honor the memory of Holocaust victims.
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