Dutch politician Geert Wilders' hate speech trial set to begin

Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders is due to go on trial accused of racial discrimination and inciting hatred, four and a half months before the people of the Netherlands go to the polls.

The charges relate to an evening in March 2014 when Wilders’s party, the Dutch Freedom Party (PVV), narrowly failed to become the largest group on the city council in The Hague. Wilders asked a room packed with supporters and activists if they wanted to have “more or fewer Moroccans” in the country. To the response of “fewer”, Wilders replied: “Well, we’ll take care of that.”

More than 6,000 people reportedly filed official complaints to the police about Wilders’ comments and, nine months later, he was formally charged with racial discrimination and inciting hatred. The maximum sentence is two years in prison, although fines and community service orders are more common.

Wilders has dismissed repeated calls to withdraw or apologise for his remarks.

On Friday, Wilders announced that he would be boycotting the trial, which he called a travesty and “against freedom of expression”. In a column for the AD newspaper, he claimed that he spoke for “millions of Dutch people, fed up with the disruption and terror caused by so many Moroccans … If talking about that is an offence, the Netherlands is no longer a free country, but a dictatorship”.

Wilders has been brought to court for his words before. In 2011, he was acquitted of discriminating against, and inciting hatred towards, Muslims in interviews in which he denounced Islam as a “fascist” religion. However, the case is supposedly stronger this time because his comments were directed against a racial group, according to Henny Sackers, professor of administrative criminal law at Radboud University in Nijmegen.