Dutch far-right MP Pepijn van Houwelingen has been ordered to pay an  €450 fine for insulting two former ministers by posting a doctored image showing them with a Nazi flag.

The Hague appeal court on Tuesday upheld his October 2024 conviction but scrapped the suspended element of the original sentence, ruling that the tweet had reached a wide audience on social media and that the Forum voor Democratie MP had “shown no insight, even on appeal, into the harmful nature of his actions”.

Van Houwelingen posted the image in September 2022. It altered an original photograph of then health minister Ernst Kuipers (D66) and then social affairs minister Karien van Gennip (CDA) raising a UN sustainable development goals (SDG) flag, replacing the SDG emblem with a swastika. He captioned it “The façade and the reality: #SDGs”.

In court last year, he argued his only intent was to warn against what he called the “totalitarian” and “utopian” objectives of the SDGs, which FvD at the time linked to conspiracy theories about coronavirus restrictions. The district court rejected that defence, finding the post had “incited intolerance”, and imposed a suspended €450 fine.

On appeal, Van Houwelingen argued the tweet was protected speech and that prosecutors had declined to pursue comparable cases against others. The appeal court rejected both arguments, saying the cases he cited were not comparable.
Van Houwelingen can still take the case to the the supreme court but has not yet said whether he will.

Prosecutors seek community service for ON presenter

Meanwhile, prosecutors have asked the Hague appeal court for a 60-hour community service order, half of it suspended, for Raisa Blommestijn, a former presenter for right-wing public broadcaster Ongehoord Nederland, over two social media posts she made in 2023.

In one she described black men seen in a video of a street assault as “negroid primates”; in the other she used a slur suggesting that lawyer and former D66 MP Sidney Smeets was a child abuser.

A district court convicted Blommestijn of group insult and defamation in December 2024 and sentenced her to 80 hours of community service plus €1,550 in damages to Smeets – more than prosecutors had originally asked for.

She has appealed, arguing the posts were protected political speech and the appeal court is due to rule later this year.