A Victory For Freedom: Update on the Geert Wilders Trial, Friday, October 15, 2010
Friday
ACCORDING TO Radio Netherlands, "The Geert Wilders trial is as good as over. The public prosecutor has called for the populist politician to be acquitted of all charges against him. The trial will continue, but everything is now an anti-climax.
"During two days of intricately constructed arguments, the prosecutors told the court they found no evidence that Geert Wilders had broken the law.
"We request acquittal on fact 2...we request acquittal on fact 3." Statement after statement, and charge after charge, prosecutors Birgit van Roessel and Paul Velleman, who took turns reading the arguments, said Wilders had not broken the law.
"The prosecutors consistently came to the same conclusion. What Wilders said may be 'hurtful to Muslims, and may be met with emotional responses', but he did not break the law.
"The prosecutors analysed each of Wilders' statements for each of the five charges against him. The charges included group defamation, inciting hatred of Muslims and non-western ethnic minorities, and inciting discrimination of Muslims and non-western ethnic minorities."
The conclusion was confirmed by Dutch News, which wrote: "The public prosecution department on Friday afternoon (October 15th, 2010) stated that Geert Wilders is not guilty of discriminating against Muslims. Earlier on Friday it announced he should also be found not guilty of inciting hatred.
"Prosecutors Birgit van Roessel and Paul Velleman reached their conclusions after a careful reading of interviews with and articles by the anti-Islam politician and a viewing of his anti-Koran film Fitna."
Geert Wilders and the forces of freedom have won this battle.
Let the trumpets sound, and let's all raise a glass to this victory. Join with people all over the world today and drink a toast to this triumph of freedom over the forces of tyranny. Free speech laws defeated hate speech laws. This is a moment worth commemorating.
And if you were one of those who helped alert others to Wilders' case, who made comments on other web sites or shared a post about it on Facebook, or if you participated in the SITA actions and wrote letters to the judge and prosecutors, please take a bow and give yourself a pat on the back. You deserve it.
4 comments:
Citizen Warrior,
Speaking of Wilders,
Unless we are to believe this is an old video, It seems he's already gotten back into the fray.
Geert Wilders Debates Jeb Cohen: Should Islam in the Netherlands Be Called To a Halt?
Citizen Warrior,
Bad News. Its not over yet.
Entire judge panel dismissed from Geert Wilders trial -- new trial ordered -- Wilder's files charges against Judge Tom Schalken for trying to influence a court expert witness
UNBELIEVABLE!
From the Guardian:
The hate speech trial of the controversial far-right Dutch leader, Geert Wilders, collapsed in disarray at the last minute today when the panel of judges in the case were deemed to be biased. A retrial was ordered.
But in the past 48 hours it emerged that one of the appeal court judges who ordered Wilders to stand trial had dinner in May with a potential witness, a Dutch expert on Islam, and that the judge had sought to convince the professor of Arabic studies why Wilders had to be prosecuted.
This morning, Bram Moszkowicz, Wilders's lawyer, asked to summon the witness and was refused. He formally protested that the judges were biased against the defendant, a complaint that was upheld by another judges' panel, which ordered a retrial with a new bench.
It was one of the appeal judges, Tom Schalken, who had dinner with the Arabist, Hans Jansen, who told a Dutch newspaper today that the judge had tried "to convince me of the correctness of the decision to take Wilders to court".
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