Far-right Baudet not prosecuted for Holocaust tweets

Forum voor Democratie leader and parliamentarian Thierry Baudet will not be prosecuted for tweets in which he compared people unvaccinated against Covid-19 with Jews in the Holocaust. Amsterdam's Public Prosecution Service (OM) dropped the case because it does not consider the statement punishable.

On 14 November 2021, Baudet tweeted that the situation under the coronavirus measures was comparable to the 1930s and 1940s. He wrote that the unvaccinated are "the new Jews." Those who look away and exclude them are the "new Nazis and NSB members," he said. The Jewish Netherlands Federation filed charges of insult and hate speech against him.

In the opinion of the OM, the purpose of the comparison was to draw attention to the adverse consequences of the coronavirus measures. "The tweet is not aimed at trivializing the Holocaust but at amplifying the inconvenience of the coronavirus measures. The OM believes that this cannot be qualified as a far-reaching form of Holocaust trivialization that threatens to fuel hatred or violence," the OM said on Thursday.

In December, Baudet lost a lawsuit over the tweet. The preliminary relief judge ruled that Baudet had to remove all statements from social media in which he compared the Cabinet's coronavirus measures to the Holocaust. "You have spoken unnecessarily offensively to victims and relatives of the Holocaust," the judge ruled then. "The right to freedom of expression for a representative of the people is not unlimited."

The OM assessed purely whether the tweets were punishable. "Criminal intervention on a politician's freedom of expression is only justified if statements go beyond hurting, shocking, and disturbing and incite hatred, violence, discrimination, or intolerance. Here there is no question of that."