A court on Wednesday ordered the race hate trial of Dutch anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders to go ahead despite claims it had no jurisdiction in the case.
The trial opened in October last year, but was abruptly halted three weeks later when the judges trying Mr Wilders were ordered to step down by a panel of their peers who upheld the politician’s claims of bias.
But the Amsterdam district court dismissed the MP’s objections that the court and prosecutors were not competent to try him because the alleged offences were not committed in Amsterdam.
“The trial will continue,” chief judge Marcel van Oosten told the court.
He said the next hearing would take place on April 13 with testimony from three defence witnesses and the case was expected to run until the end of June.
Mr Wilders, 47, faces five counts of giving offence to Muslims and of inciting hatred against Muslims and people of non-Western immigrant origin, particularly Moroccans.
The prosecution case focuses on the short film Fitna, which catapulted Mr Wilders to international notoriety in 2008 and in which he mixes Koranic verses with footage of extremist attacks. In the film he likened the Koran to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Mr Wilders’ lawyers claimed that the film was distributed via an American server and was not released in Amsterdam but Mr van Oosten said that even so it was aimed at a Dutch audience.
“The film is, when you take into account its contents and sub-titles in the Dutch language, destined for a Dutch audience,” he told the court.
The MP, whose Party for Freedom gives parliamentary support to a right-leaning coalition, faces up to a year in jail or a €7,600 fine for comments made in his campaign to “stop the Islamisation of the Netherlands”.
However, judges did agree with the defence that part of the indictment against Mr Wilders should be dropped. In it he allegedly refers to the Koran as “fascist” and said it should be banned.
The judges said that in including the quotes in the indictment prosecutors were going beyond the brief set out by the Amsterdam appeals court.