His lawyers tried to argue he should not had been convicted because the comment was made during a television interview broadcast in Sweden, where Holocaust denial is not illegal. But the interview was recorded in Germany, where it is a criminal offence to dispute the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis. The European court said it found no reason to disagree with the German ruling that Williamson's "denial and downplaying of the genocide perpetrated against the Jews had disparaged the dignity of the Jewish victims". He was excommunicated by the Vatican in 1988 after he was ordained by a fundamentalist archbishop against papal orders. Williamson was excommunicated for a second time in 2015 after he consecrated a new bishop in Brazil despite not being authorized to do so.

Source: The Local January 31, 2019 11:48 UTC