A nationalist activist and former Belgian MP has been convicted of “hate speech” over a lecture where he presented migrant crime statistics and scientific data on racial differences.
Dries Van Langenhove, 33, who was previously sentenced to one year in prison for “offensive” memes posted by other people in a private group chat, faced the Correctional Court of First Instance in Leuven on Tuesday over a lecture he made at KU Leuven in February 2024.
Mr Van Langenhove was found guilty of one count of “incitement to hatred or violence against a group on grounds of nationality, so-called race, skin colour, origin or ethnic descent”, and one count of “dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or racial hatred”.
A very sad announcement.
I have just been convicted a second time for ‘hate speech’ and it is only due to a technicality that I could not immediately be sent to jail —to the judge’s frustration.
In an ironic turn of events it’s actually thanks to my previous prison sentence… pic.twitter.com/76xOy6qnA4
— Dries Van Langenhove (@DVanLangenhove) May 26, 2026
The remigration advocate was acquitted of a similar gender-related charge over the lecture at the catholic university, and fined €4,000, Brussels Signal reported.
During the lecture Mr Van Langenhove discussed topics including the Great Replacement and multiculturalism, said mass immigration was linked to crime and causing housing shortages and societal problems, and argued inequality was caused by group differences rather than structural racism.
“People are not equal, animals are not equal, plants are not equal, there is nothing in nature that is equal,” he said at one point in the speech.
The judges stated that while freedom of speech has some protections under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Belgian Constitution, Mr Van Langenhove’s lecture crossed the threshold into criminality.
“For an act to be punishable, it is not necessary for the defendant to have openly incited others to commit specific acts of hatred or violence… It is sufficient that others are incited to adopt a general attitude of intolerance or aversion towards the targeted group of persons,” the judges found.
They also concluded that Mr Van Langenhove intentionally incited hatred, accused him of using disclaimers to shield himself from prosecution, and found his overall message attributed societal problems to certain groups and promoted group hierarchies.
Mr Van Langenhove addressed his conviction in a long post on X where he said the judges were frustrated at being unable to send him to jail, and said all of the points made in his lecture were “100% the truth and based on scientific evidence”.
He quoted the judge as saying: “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.”
“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,” he wrote.
“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. Sadly, in Belgium, evidence is not needed and ‘vibes’ are enough to put someone in jail.”
Mr Van Langehove said he has already spent more than €420,000 fighting numerous “hate speech” charged and is due in court again in September, and has started a GiveSendGo to raise funds for his legal defence.
In June last year he had his sentence for the group chat memes reduced and suspended on appeal, but then lost another appeal in January, and is ineligible to be re-elected to parliament as his civil rights were suspended for 10 years as part of his conviction.
Header image: Dries Van Langenhove (Instagram).
