Jan Huzen from Nieuw-Weerdinge was also convicted of incitement and defamation on appeal. The activist has received a community service of 80 hours, half of which was conditional. He also has to pay a journalist a compensation of 250 euros after he had called him for pedophile.
The conviction for incitement is placed on his Facebook page by messages. In this he asked to share addresses where children would stay who were placed out of the house after the allowance affair. “Who knows where the 1,700 children are kept hidden, we may mess up. Then we will make a decision with a whole group of people whether we can free these children so that they can return to their own parents.”
According to the judge, Huzen encouraged other people to commit criminal offenses that fall under incitement. According to the judge, the defense of Huzen that he only wanted to contribute to the public debate and that it fell under freedom of expression was unfounded. The Advocate General (AG, the public prosecutor on appeal) believes that freedom of expression does not outweigh the incentive of criminal offenses.
In addition to the incitement, Huzen was also convicted of defamation after he compared journalist Willem Groeneveld of the Groningen medium Sikkom with a pedophile. For example, Huzen shared a photo of Groeneveld with the inscription ‘Pedophiel Spotted’. Also in the appeal, the court believes that he has deliberately damaged the honor and good name of the journalist.
The conditional part of the punishment for Huzen has a probationary period of three years. If he went wrong again in that period, he must also perform this punishment. On his Facebook page, Huzen responds to the conviction by saying that he “is not silent. This conviction shows exactly where it sands: instead of speaking, they try to pent critical sound.”