THE HAGUE – The court in The Hague acquitted activist Willem Engel on Thursday of sedition and ignoring a police order. A community service order of ninety hours and a conditional fine of 250 euros were demanded.
The 47-year-old leader of action group Viruswaarheid was suspected of incitement via Facebook during a demonstration in the center of The Hague against the corona emergency law in October 2020. He called in a livestream to arrest police officers. However, the court does not call those statements inciting, partly because he explicitly called for no violence and no resistance. “The court rules that it cannot be proven that the suspect incited violence against the public authorities, given the content and scope of the statement,” the ruling reads.
Engel is also said to have ignored a police order to leave The Hague after the demonstration was banned by the mayor. However, the court sees this differently, because Engel did indeed walk away after being asked to do so. The fact that he was arrested shortly afterwards does not mean that he did not intend to leave, according to the court. “The time span between the order to leave the city and the encirclement of the group of demonstrators and the subsequent arrest is too short for that.”
This criminal case is separate from an earlier criminal case that followed a mass complaint. The court in Rotterdam largely acquitted Engel and sentenced him to a one-month suspended prison sentence for incitement. That case concerned a series of messages about corona on social media. This case is still on appeal.
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