Debanking, Verlust des Jobs – man kennt bereits viele Repressalien gegen politisch Andersdenkende. Aber was der Belgier Dries Van Langenhove, Vater zweier kleiner Mädchen, erleben musste, schlägt alles bisher Bekanntes. Der Aktivist einer patriotischen Jugendorganisation klagte sein Leid kürzlich den Mitgliedern der ECPA-Fraktion (Konservative, Patrioten und Verbündete) im Europarat.
Bedrohung für Machthaber in Belgien
Dries Van Langenhove war Belgiens jüngster Abgeordneter und Mitglied des Kuratoriums der Universität Genf. Er gründete 2017 eine nationalistische Jugendbewegung, die innerhalb kürzester Zeit enorm anwuchs und – so sagt Langenhove – „die Macht des antinationalistischen belgischen Regimes“ ernsthaft bedrohte.
2018 wurden Chats der Gruppe gehackt – und es wurde eifrig nach allem, was nur irgendwie gegen diese Bewegung verwendet werden könnte, gesucht. Das Einzige was gefunden wurde, waren einige harmlose, aber politisch unkorrekte Memes, die aus dem Kontext gerissen und den Regime-Medien geliefert wurden.Â
Zwanzig (!) Hausdurchsuchungen
Ein Hetzartikel folgte dem anderen. Es wurde behauptet, Langenhove wäre ein gefährlicher Extremist. Daraufhin führten die Behörden zwanzig (!) Hausdurchsuchungen durch. Wörtlich sagte Langenhove vor den Europarats-Abgeordneten:
Die Polizei des Regimes fand bei keiner der Hausdurchsuchungen oder Verhören etwas Illegales. Medien terrorisieren seither mich und meine Familie.
Unfassbares Angebot
Langenhove beschwerte sich über diesen „Staatsterror“. Rasch schlugen die Behörden zurück: Bewaffnete Polizisten zerrten ihn mitten in der Nacht aus dem Bett und brachten ihn ins Gefängnis. Dort unterbreitete man ihm ein unfassbares Angebot: „Im Gegenzug für meine körperliche Freiheit müsste ich meine Meinungsfreiheit aufgeben. Ich wurde gezwungen, eine Schweigevereinbarung zu unterzeichnen, die es mir verbot, über den Terror zu sprechen, den das Regime mir und meiner Familie antat“.
Schweigepflicht diente der öffentlichen Sicherheit
Der junge Mann unterschrieb und verpflichtete sich außerdem, jeden Monat zur Polizei zu gehen, um zu versprechen, zu schweigen. Langenhove meinte im Europarat, der ja für Menschenrechte zuständig ist:
Mein Anwalt und ich gingen mehrmals vor Gericht, um die Aufhebung dieser Schweigepflicht zu erwirken, doch selbst die höchsten Gerichte wiesen unsere Berufungen mit der absurden Begründung ab, die Schweigepflicht sei für die öffentliche Sicherheit notwendig.
Wegen “Anstiftung zum Hass” verurteilt
Nachrichten wurden von der Staatsanwalt als Hassreden eingestuft. Doch keiner konnte ihm diesbezüglich etwas nachweisen. Die Richterin, erzählte Langenhove, habe dies sogar eingeräumt und in ihrem Urteil ausgeführt: „Obwohl keine Beiträge dem ersten Angeklagten, Dries Van Langenhove, zugeordnet werden können, ist er dennoch schuldig, da er eine Atmosphäre geschaffen hat, in der andere hasserfüllte Dinge posteten“.
Das stimme natürlich nicht, sagte der Belgier. Seine Bewegung habe lediglich die negative Frustration, die viele Jugendliche angesichts der Massenmigration und des Verfalls empfanden, kanalisiert. Doch die Staatsanwaltschaft und die Richter hätten darauf bestanden, „mich wegen Hassrede, oder wie sie es offiziell nennen: ‚Anstiftung zum Hass‘, zu verurteilen“. Da die Memes nicht mit ihm in Verbindung gebracht werden konnten, erfanden die Behörden einen neuen Grund für eine Verurteilung.
Keine Meinungsfreiheit
Inzwischen hat Dries Van Langenhove mehr als 400.000 Euro ausgegeben, um gerichtlich gegen den “Staatsterror” vorzugehen. Letzte Hoffnung ist der Europarat. Wenn dieser nicht reagiert, was bei der sozialistischen Mehrheit kaum denkbar ist, bleibt ihm nur noch die Flucht aus der Heimat. Als politisch Verfolgter, der seine Meinung nicht sagen darf.
Rede im Europarat in englischer Originalsprache
Lesen Sie hier die Ausführungen von Dries Van Langenhove vor den Abgeordneten im Europarat in englischer Originalsprache:
Dear members of the Council of Europe, I have an important warning for you all and an even more important call to action. Now before I start I must say I am very well aware that not all of you share my ideas. But that doesn’t matter. What I am about to explain is important to anyone. My name is Dries Van Langenhove. I was born and bred on the outskirts of Brussels and I’m a young father of two little girls. Formerly I was Belgium’s youngest Member of Parliament and Member of the Board of Governors at Ghent University. Sadly nowadays, internationally, I am most known as the activist who got twice convicted for hate speech — even being given a prison sentence. Normally this is the point where I give a lengthy introduction explaining how things came to be, but given today’s time constraints, I’ll cut straight to the chase.
In 2017 I founded a nationalist political youth movement that became huge in no time, seriously threatening the power of the anti-nationalist Belgian regime. In 2018 the regime ordered a hacker of its Data & Desinformation unit to hack the account of a 17-year-old who was a member of some of our private group chats. The hacker then searched avidly for anything that could be used against us. After months, he found nothing, so he took some innocent but politically incorrect memes out of context and delivered them to the regime media, who used them to launch a crazy hitpiece claiming we were dangerous extremists. A few memes, jokes that included Adolf Hitler, were falsely presented by regime media as our political ideology.
In an obviously coordinated effort, immediately after this hitpiece, the regime ordered twenty house raids at my house and at other top activists of our movement. Fifty others were interrogated. The regime police found nothing illegal in any of the house raids or interrogations, so out of no other reason than to terrorise me and my family, all of the private information and devices they had confiscated in my home were given to the regime media, who have used it to terrorise me and my family ever since. That aspect has been particularly traumatising, because it means that I have no more private moments with my family. Every picture, every message…
When I started complaining that this was not an investigation, but actual state terror, the regime ordered another house raid. Armed police officers tore me out of bed in the middle of the night and took me to prison. There, I was made an offer by the regime: in return for my physical freedom I would have to give up my freedom of speech. I was made to sign a gag order prohibiting me from talking about the terror the regime was inflicting upon me and my family. I signed this gag order and in the years that followed I was made to go back to the regime police every month to promise to remain silent. My lawyer and I went to court multiple times to have this gag order lifted, but even the highest courts refused our appeals, with the absurd argument that the gag order was necessary for public safety.
Later, my house was raided a third time, but again, nothing even remotely illegal was found. During all of these years, dozens of federal judicial police officers went through millions of my messages and hundreds of thousands of my pictures and images. They desperately kept searching for something they could use against me, but they did not find it, which is why the so-called “investigation” took many years to complete. In the end, the regime police had nothing they could really use against us, so they resorted to using the same silly memes that were shown in the hitpiece years earlier. These memes, which were obviously posted in a humouristic context, were labeled by the public prosecutor as hate speech and used to demand hefty prison sentences.
Important to note is that I didn’t even see these memes in the private group chat, and I was able to prove this in court. The judge admits as much and wrote in her verdict that, “even though no posts can be linked to the first defendant, Dries Van Langenhove, he is still guilty because he created an atmosphere in which others posted hateful things.”
This second part isn’t true, of course. Our movement channeled the negative frustration that many of our youth were feeling about mass migration and degeneracy into positive action like charity works, handing out food packages to people in need, visiting lonely elderly people, cleaning up monuments and war graves, picking up litter, and donating blood. I never encouraged any hateful things and these jokes weren’t hateful to begin with. But still, the public prosecutor and judges were adamant in trying to convict for hate speech, or as they officially call it: “incitement to hatred.”
Since the memes could not be linked to me, the public prosecutor and the judges came up with a new reason to convict me. They employed Textgain. This is a Belgian AI firm that employs their AI algorithm to determine the toxicity score of a person’s communication. This Textgain AI went over all of my private messages and automatically gave them a toxicity score. My score, they concluded, was higher than the average toxicity score, so the AI determined I was guilty. Yes — an AI determined I was guilty. This is flawed in many ways, because their AI was trained on public social media comments, which are of course more polite and polished than private communication. But what made it truly egregious was that the public prosecution refused to give me a full list of the supposed “toxic comments” the Textgain AI had found in my private communication, even when I begged the judge to provide such a list.
I kept asking the prosecutor and judge, “Where and how, exactly, did I incite to hatred?” There was never a response until the final verdict in the court of appeals. There, the judge wrote: “It is not the case that it must be specified which concrete material acts the accused is precisely alleged to have committed.” This sentence essentially means: we don’t have to provide you with any evidence.
That is the danger of hate speech laws. Someone can be convicted based on thoughts or vibes. The judge has endless discretionary power. If she decides that I had hateful thoughts in my head, I am guilty, and there is no defense possible because I cannot prove my thoughts.
But if you believe this is bad, it gets a lot worse.
During the prosecution, the regime saw the huge support I was getting both from the public and from politicians, so they realised a conviction for “inciting hatred on the basis of race,” especially on such flimsy pretexts, would not be enough to make me toxic and destroy my political projects. So they decided to take it all to the extremes and suddenly added Holocaust denial to the charges.
“There are no messages or statements relating to the Holocaust from the first defendant, Dries Van Langenhove…” (criminal court, p. 24).
“The files show Dries Van Langenhove himself has sent no messages or memes that could be seen as relating to the Holocaust.” (court of appeals, p. 75).
Still convicted.
Why do they do all this? Because this is the most toxic thought crime possible. They know they don’t need any proof for the toxicity to work. It becomes nearly impossible to get support. Almost every door closes. Even if people can see through it all, they are scared.
Many more criminal investigations and cases are still pending, but today I want to talk about one more case, where I was convicted a second time.
In February 2024 I gave a lecture at Catholic University Leuven wherein I linked mass migration to crime and a deterioration of our quality of life. Every single point I made was 100% the truth and based on scientific evidence.
Cynically, even the judge that convicted me admits as much by writing in his verdict: “Even if all of the statements made by Van Langenhove are based on scientific evidence and statistics, it makes no difference to the criminal intent. Van Langenhove is not charged with spreading false information. He is charged with presenting facts in a way that incites hatred against persons on the grounds of one or more of the protected criteria in the Anti-Racism Law.”
Even the regime media write: “It did not matter to the court that Van Langenhove was quoting scientific sources. The judge argued that Van Langenhove’s main message was that a big part of the societal problems like insecurity, housing shortages and lowering educational standards are due to mass migration.”
You may think the regime media are being sympathetic to me in the first sentence, but in reality they are warning people: even if you speak the truth, if you go against our narrative, we will crush you in every way possible.
Both the public prosecutor and the judge did not present a single real argument as to how or against whom I would have incited hatred. So even if I would accept their crazy, dystopic law, I still did not break it.
The only argument they present is that I created a “hostile atmosphere of us versus them” in regards to migrants. But even this silly argument (which is not even a punishable offence) is not true. To me, the deadly disease is self-hatred and one of its worst symptoms is replacement migration. My enemy is thus not the migrants themselves but those orchestrating the mass migration.
The judge also did not present any concrete acts of hatred to which I would have incited. He writes:
“For Van Langenhove to have committed a crime, it is not necessary for him to have incited concrete acts of hate or violence. It suffices that others are incited to take on a general attitude of intolerance or disapproval regarding a group protected under the criteria of the Anti-Racism Law.”
This means you can go to jail for “inciting hatred” even if your statements were 100% factual and even if you did not incite concrete acts of hate.
The benchmark of “inciting hatred”, a crime punishable by prison, is thus “saying something that has the potential of inciting someone to have a general attitude of disapproval regarding a protected group”. This means literally any criticism of mass migration is now a punishable offence. If you cite a statistic, and someone could potentially think less of a protected group (like migrants) because of it, you can be jailed.
The craziest part is that there is no defence possible against this. I brought the scientific studies that I cited to court, but the judge didn’t care. I also proved that the hundreds of students present at the lecture included students of all different political affiliations, and everyone was able to voice their opinion or ask questions. The lecture went very calmly, so obviously nobody was incited to hatred. But this too did not matter, because if the judge says he believes there is the possibility that someone could be incited to “a general attitude of disapproval”, this is enough for the judge to send me to jail, even without any evidence.
I’m telling you this to warn you that by the time these hate speech laws have come into place, it’s already too late. As you can see from my cases, we can never beat these laws in court. We have to stop them before they are implemented. Let my fate be your warning.
This is why your role is so important. The soft law that is created in the Council of Europe is very often the first decision in a chain of decisions that eventually leads to countries either criminalising free speech or strengthening free speech.
I have appealed my case at the European Court of Human Rights, over which you preside. Sadly, it may take up to a decade before there is a verdict, which makes it impossible to achieve justice this way. Moreover, even the ECHR is becoming ever more politicised, which makes it lose its original purpose as a protector of the rights of everyone, not just of those who support the leftist liberal narrative.
Ladies and gentlemen, I conclude my statements. As you have heard, I have been through quite a lot. I have been waterboarded with injustice to the point of exhaustion. I have been smeared with toxic accusations to the point that even those who see through it all are hesitant to reach out. For me, it may be too late, but for the many young activists stepping up on the barricades for our people and civilization—despite all the risks and sacrifices—for them, it is not too late. They need your help. Don’t ever let this happen again.
