Flemish party banned as racist by Belgium's high court

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Belgium's most popular political party was banned as racist by the country's high court yesterday, fuelling concerns that the judicial branch is being used to eliminate political enemies.

The Vlaams Blok, a Flemish independence party promising to abolish Belgium as a nation, now cannot receive funding of any kind, and will have to disband.

Frank Vanhecke, the party's chairman, accused the ruling elite of using totalitarian tactics to stop legitimate political expression and vowed to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights.

"This is an attack on democracy and free speech. Our political opponents have changed the racism laws six times in a campaign to have us condemned. What they have done today is shocking," he said.

The party leaders plan to relaunch it next week with a new name, Vlaams Belang, or Flemish Interest, and a manifesto extolling women's rights, the secular state and the rule of law.

Analysts say attempts to muzzle the group have invariably failed, adding to its mystique as the victim of a reviled establishment that has saddled Belgium with a huge national debt and some of the highest taxes in the world.

The Vlaams Blok has risen from murky neo-fascist roots to reinvent itself as a modern, free-market party and become the biggest in Dutch-speaking Flanders, the richest part of Belgium with 60 percent of the population.

Its ever-growing popularity is a threat to the ruling liberal party of Guy Verhofstadt, the prime minister, who could face political annihilation in the next election. The lawsuit against the Vlaams Blok was brought by a rights watchdog controlled by the prime minister's office.

The high court upheld an earlier ruling that party branches had violated race laws by distributing 16 leaflets in the late 1990s deemed to be incitement against immigrants. The party attacked the ruling as a breach of free speech since much of the material consisted of official statistics.

One of the tracts, denouncing female circumcision in Islamic countries, was written by a Turkish-born woman member of the Vlaams Blok but the court ruled that the arguments were intended to foment anti-Muslim feeling.