BRUSSELS, March 17 (UPI) -- A former Belgian senator went on trial Friday for denying the Holocaust during an interview on Dutch television.
The court watched Roeland Raes' interview and then adjourned until June 15, Expatica reports.
Raes, a leader in the Flemish nationalist party Vlaams Blok -- which has since been reconstituted as the Vlaams Belang -- was interviewed because he had ties to a similar Dutch group. On television, he suggested that Anne Frank's diary was faked and said the Nazis did not operate death or concentration camps, just very poorly run work camps.
The Forum of Jewish Organizations in Flanders filed a complaint after the broadcast, charging that Raes had violated Belgian Holocaust denial laws. His remarks cost Raes his positions in the Senate, as vice chairman of Vlaams Blok and as a director at the University of Ghent.
