A former lawmaker in Belgium convicted of Holocaust denial in 2015 was handed an unusual sentence this week: The Brussels Court of Appeal ordered him to visit one Nazi concentration camp a year for the next five years and write about his experiences, according to the former lawmaker and local news reports.

The politician, Laurent Louis, is a far-right gadfly known for making inflammatory statements about Jews. He once called former prime minister Elio Di Rupo, the first gay man to hold the post, a pedophile. Louis left Parliament in 2014.

Laurent was given a six-month suspended jail sentence and fined more than $20,000 (U.S.) at his 2015 trial, which centred on online statements he made that questioned the number of Jews killed in gas chambers during the Holocaust. After that sentence was changed Wednesday, he celebrated on Facebook and apologized “to anyone who may have been hurt by my remarks.”

“All that is left for me to do is to go and report in the death camps,” he wrote in a statement. “No doubt, the Court has recognized my talents as a writer.”

Louis is a marginal figure in Belgium, but political observers said his case illustrated growing worries about anti-Semitism as well as the different approaches that the United States and Europe have taken in response to the expression of far-right views.

Vocal support for Nazism and denial or expressions of doubt about the Holocaust are criminal offences in more than a dozen European countries, including France, Germany, Belgium and Poland, according to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel. The type of punishment handed down to Louis is rare but has happened at least once before, in Hungary in 2013.

That is in sharp contrast to the United States, where the right to express far-right views, including neo-Nazi beliefs and white supremacy, is protected by the First Amendment.

In his statement Wednesday, Louis said he would obey the ruling and “repent every year in a death camp.” In addition to being “very educational and very powerful on a human level,” he said the experience would also be a chance to “denounce current genocides.” That is language he has used in the past to refer to Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip.

“Laurent Louis is generally considered as a buffoon,” said Dave Sinardet, a professor of political science at the Free University of Brussels. “He unites Belgian politicians all across the board in the sense that none of them take him seriously.”

But Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta, said even fringe figures should be taken seriously. She called his sentence “unusual.”

“Don’t see this as one crazy guy who happens to be a Holocaust denier,” said Lipstadt, who opposes the criminalization of Holocaust denial.

She is an expert on the subject: The Holocaust denier David Irving unsuccessfully sued her for libel in 1996, a trial that served as the basis for the 2016 film “Denial.”

Sinardet said Louis’ election to Parliament in 2010 was “an accident” caused in part by the complexity of Belgium’s Byzantine political system, which divides power between the country’s French- and Dutch-speaking communities.

Louis joined and left or was expelled from several parties during his time in Parliament, often because of his “borderline racist declarations,” Sinardet said.

At trial in 2015, online statements Louis made in support of the French far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen were found to have violated a law against the minimization, justification or approval of the Holocaust.

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“To summarize, I have invited the people who follow me to ask about Jean-Marie Le Pen’s condemnation of his remarks with regard to the gas chambers, which he considered to be a ‘detail’ of the Second World War,” Louis wrote in an email Wednesday night. He said he had never denied the existence of the Holocaust, “but I have questioned the essential role of the gas chambers in this extermination and this questioning is prohibited by Belgian law.”

Lipstadt said that defence was common among Holocaust deniers and others on the far right who “market” their beliefs by posing as reasonable people who are simply asking hard questions.