MP Gideon van Meijeren of Forum for Democracy has been acquitted on appeal of sedition in his calls in 2022 to overthrow the “tyrannical government”. The court in The Hague does not consider it proven that the right-wing radical parliamentarian “considered in terms of content and purport in their mutual connection with his statements […] has incited violent action against public authorities.” Van Meijeren had previously been sentenced by the court to two hundred hours of community service, one hundred of which were conditional.
Van Meijeren (37) stated in a speech in Tuil in West Brabant in 2022 that, in his opinion, the use of force could not be ruled out if a government with its monopoly on violence turns against the citizen. According to him, the emergency response also applies if the government “abuses the monopoly on violence”. The FvD member made these statements at a farmers’ meeting at the time of the strongest protests against the nitrogen policy. According to the Court, Van Meijeren “did not make this violence concrete, not for the here and now, nor for the future.”
According to the Advocate General (OM), there was an “ammunition barrel in which a fuse is placed while the sparks are already crackling around”, but the Court did not agree. Van Meijeren had apparently spoken “off the cuff” and pushed the boundaries of criminal law, but did not exceed them, according to the Court.
In an interview with a Belgian conspiracy channel in the same year, Van Meijeren said that he hopes that citizens will move to The Hague and not leave until the government falls, indicating that such uprisings in the past have sometimes resulted in fatalities. Unlike the Advocate General (the Public Prosecution Service) and the court, the Court sees the comments that follow about peaceful resistance “as a relevant part of the suspect’s argument.”
Van Meijeren was sentenced to sixty hours of community service in 2023 for driving through a red light on a shared scooter without a driver’s license, which had recently been confiscated because he refused a breath test when he left the parking garage of the House of Representatives in his car.
