Spain’s legal system is the first to issue such a sentence.

Spanish  bookseller and neo-Nazi activist Pedro Varela has been sentenced on Tuesday by the Provincial Court of Barcelona to one and a half year in prison for glorifying the Holocaust.

The owner of Liberia Europa, a bookshop which disseminates Hitlerism and ultra-right wing ideas, has accumulated convictions, reported daily Publico.

“This morning the sentence against Pedro Varela was announced: 18 months in prison,” said the platform supporting the neo-Nazi in a message posted on the social network X.

According to the court ruling, the bookseller has been convicted of denying or glorifying the crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity. In addition, he must pay a fine of seven months, at a rate of 15 euros per day, with subsidiary personal liability in case of non-payment.

The ruling also establishes the penalty of “special disqualification for educational profession or trade, in the field of teaching, sports and leisure time, for a period exceeding three years of the duration of the sentence of deprivation of liberty imposed in his case in the sentence”.

Likewise, the sentence establishes his “special disqualification for profession, trade, industry or commerce related to the edition, distribution and sale of books or publications both physically and virtually”.

“The ‘Europa Bookstore’, which has never had any municipal license to exercise commercial activity nor is it registered in any municipal registry, is a reference of national socialist thought,” the sentence of the Barcelona Court of Appeals highlights.

The ruling highlights that Varela, through that store, sold and distributed “not only for all of Spain but also for many countries in the rest of Europe and Latin America, books, cd’s, dvd’s and all kinds of merchandising” of anti-Semitic and racist content, “justifying or denying the existence of the Jewish Holocaust and promoting hostility, discrimination, hatred and violence against the Jewish people or against racial, ethnic and sexual minorities”.

The Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain (FCJE) and the Movement Against Intolerance (MCI), which  intervened as popular accusation in the trial against Pedro Varela, considered that the sentence “is satisfactory, although it could have been stronger.”  They announced that they reserve the possibility of “appealing the acquittal on illicit association and other aspects”.

Both organizations consider positive that “for the first time since the 2007 Constitutional Court ruling and the subsequent 2015 reform of the Penal Code, it is convicted for the criminal type 510.1.c, which refers to Holocaust denial and its trivialization.”

“This sentence can satisfy neither the memorialist movement, nor the anti-fascist movement nor the victims of Nazism,” said  Eduardo Gonzalez, spokesman for Sare Antifaxista (Anti-Fascist Network), a collective that for years has been denouncing neo-Nazi campaigns.

“We must remember that there were hundreds and hundreds of anti-fascist Republicans who ended up in Nazi extermination camps. Now we see that there is no memory, no justice, no reparation for the victims, nor is there any compliance with the latest law of democratic memory of the Spanish government,” Gonzalez deplored.