Willem Engel tells his story to RFK Jr after being released from prison. On March 16, 2022, Willem Engel was suddenly arrested like a felon on the open street and handcuffed. What exactly he was accused of did not seem to be clear to the surprised Engel... listen to the story in this episode. more info: https://childrenshealthdefense.eu/eu-issues/things-get-serious-dutch-critic-arrested/
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| Hey everybody, my guest today is William Engel, who has just been released from prison. | |
| Welcome to freedom again, William. | |
| William is one of the most high-profile European activists. | |
| He's been in prison twice in the Netherlands. | |
| He has a degree in biopharmacy and analytical chemistry. | |
| His advocacy has been extraordinary and he You're on a number of the calls that I also am on regularly with European activists and lawyers. | |
| You know, I'm really grateful for your leadership. | |
| Tell us about how you got arrested when you were at the voting booth, right? | |
| Exactly. | |
| So it was quite an event. | |
| A few weeks ago, after casting my vote, a few, what I thought was thugs, So I was very surprised because there is a case, but that's from 2020. | |
| And they would bring it in front of court on the 30th of March. | |
| And this first arrest was on the 16th of March. | |
| So I was surprised. | |
| I thought, well, the court case is still coming up. | |
| But this was a new case. | |
| And they brought me in. | |
| There was no real reason to. | |
| They could have called me. | |
| I could have gone to the police station. | |
| But I think they wanted to give a message to other activists and other public journalists that if you keep speaking out, then we will silence you. | |
| So I was in prison for two weeks. | |
| They released me on the special condition of That I could not post anything on social media. | |
| Now, I got out. | |
| I didn't do anything on social media, but I gave a few interviews. | |
| And because of those interviews, on my next trip to a demonstration, I was arrested again, full of the highway, because I was visible on social media. | |
| This swayed the public opinion so much that even the mainstream media cried out about this suppression of the freedom of speech. | |
| A few days later, I was released and those restrictions were lifted. | |
| So that was a huge win in the public debate for free speech. | |
| In our country, we have the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech to American citizens. | |
| We don't really have it anymore in our country, but at least we have it on paper. | |
| What is the guarantee in the Netherlands? | |
| Does it come to the European community or is there a constitution? | |
| Of course, there is a constitution in Holland as well, but there is also something as the European Treaty of Human Rights, and that actually supersedes the Dutch constitution. | |
| To be technical, Article 93 and 94, which say that all these human rights that are in the European Union are above any Dutch law. | |
| And then, specifically, Article 10 is the article for the freedom of speech, and that was the article that was invoked in the case with the judges when I was released again. | |
| In our country, the freedom of speech and the enforcement of the Constitution is pretty much absolute. | |
| There's no exceptions, but the courts have created exceptions. | |
| You can't shout and fire In a crowded theatre, you can't incite violence or riot. | |
| You can't advocate for pedophilia. | |
| So there are some narrow exceptions. | |
| Do they have the same thing in the Netherlands? | |
| Yes, that's basically in Article 10.2. | |
| So that is the restrictions. | |
| The first part is about the liberty. | |
| So I think it's for public health, for the order, for public safety. | |
| These grounds can be a ground to limit the freedom of speech. | |
| And that is, of course, the whole idea behind a charge of sedition, that you have called for violence or for people to systematically break the law. | |
| But they try to redefine what is incitement. | |
| So if I say, let's demonstrate, and then other people, and normally this is the agent provocateurs that start some violence in the demonstration, then they turn it around and they say, well, you organized the demonstration and it got out of hand. | |
| So you incited violence. | |
| And that is very reminiscent of what Hitler did in his Nazi era when they really changed or reinterpreted the law to do what they wanted. | |
| Did they tell you exactly what the statements that you made were that were actionable? | |
| Yes. | |
| So there was calling for demonstration after a judge had ruled that it could not carry on because of these COVID restrictions. | |
| And we also fought that in court and the judge blatantly lied. | |
| So I filed charges against judges quite regularly and I understand that it's Doesn't influence the judges in a positive way. | |
| But for me, right is right. | |
| So if they break the law, they should be brought for justice as well. | |
| So what is the disposition of your case now? | |
| You now have two cases against you. | |
| That means you have two. | |
| Are they criminal trials? | |
| Yes, they're criminal trials. | |
| And I think the maximum penalty would be five years, but... | |
| It's a show trial. | |
| It reminds me of the book from Kafka, the trial, or the Dreyfus trials in France. | |
| It's a completely constructed case, and when you read through it, you quite easily disseminate and take it apart. | |
| So the battle is not whether I have committed a crime, but whether the public prosecutor can fool the judge in that there is evidence of a crime. | |
| Whose choice was it to arrest you? | |
| Is it the prosecutor? | |
| Is it the police? | |
| Is it a government official who tells the prosecutor this guy's a prosecutor? | |
| So officially it's the public prosecutor which orders the police for an arrest and then has to ask within three days To a judge whether that arrest was lawful and whether the detainee can be detained for a longer period. | |
| So in my case it was first two days. | |
| Then the judge ruled that I had to be held for 14 more days. | |
| Then I was released and they said I broke the conditions. | |
| So after four days I was arrested again. | |
| I've been in jail for three days and then finally the third judge ruled like this is completely unconstitutional. | |
| He has to be released immediately. | |
| However, there is still these two court cases. | |
| But now I have a few months to prepare and gather all the evidence and show that all these arguments they have cooked up are completely false. | |
| So it's mainly about seven tweets and four of the tweets they say they had real life damage in a sense that people were harassed or that there was violence at demonstrations. | |
| So do you know which tweets specifically they're going after you for? | |
| Yes. | |
| So I got the file once I was imprisoned and I went through the file. | |
| Of course, my lawyers went through the file as well. | |
| And there was a lot of information missing. | |
| So the detectives should have picked it up. | |
| And we don't know whether they did that intentionally or unintentionally. | |
| But it was also some information that was not in the research. | |
| But it wasn't a charge. | |
| So what we found out is that the district attorney or the public prosecutor actually fabricated evidence, because this is a social media trial. | |
| It's only about what I post on social media. | |
| Now, they have tried to construct a false narrative and a false context to certain tweets, taking them out of the discussion or just taking a few sentences out of a tweet. | |
| So completely distorting the message that it was. | |
| But the fabrication of inciting arsony, that was the most egregious one. | |
| And it's also very easily debunkable. | |
| So what happened, I think three days after my arrest, the public prosecutor was taken off the case already. | |
| Now, the Ministry of Justice is still pursuing the case, but they have changed the one who is prosecuting. | |
| And it shows to us that now they feel that they have overreached, overstepped, and that the case is very weak and they have to solve it. | |
| But once it is before the judge, they cannot pull it back anymore. | |
| And is the judge that's going to hear the first of these cases, is he the same judge that you have accused of lying? | |
| I don't think so. | |
| But, like, they will run out of judges very soon, I would say. | |
| Because all these judges and I can understand their difficult position because they are political tools. | |
| They're under a lot of pressure. | |
| We won two court cases in the last two years. | |
| What happened is that our government changed the law within one or two days. | |
| Or they filed an appeal case within four hours. | |
| These things that really show the complete corruption of the system. | |
| That if a citizen asks for a speedy appeal, you get four months. | |
| But when the government asks, they get four hours. | |
| So we have to be back in court in four hours. | |
| And that shows that this system is broken. | |
| Sometimes there are judges, but if they rule in favor of us, then they're taken off the case and we'll never see them again. | |
| In your interview on The Defender, I read kind of an ambiguous comment that there were 10,000 people who signed a petition against you as a... | |
| That seemed very strange. | |
| Yeah, so what happened, and that's another charge that we're making against the Ministry of Justice. | |
| So what happened is that there was a counter-activist, you could say. | |
| He started the petition, and I think in the end he got 22,500 people signing on to the charge that he was making against me for sedition and inciting and misinformation. | |
| It was a very crazy charge, actually. | |
| But he got so much media attention. | |
| He was on every major network and every major newspaper. | |
| So they really wanted to get a lot of numbers. | |
| And taking that into account, it's actually not that much. | |
| What happened is that the Ministry of Justice actually used him as a pawn. | |
| He's a stalker of me. | |
| I have already filed a few charges against him. | |
| If you look at his social media, it's quite obsessed. | |
| Three, four tweets a day, just about me. | |
| Anything that he tweets is about me. | |
| It's very obsessive. | |
| But what happened is that the Ministry of Justice shared a lot of research information from my case, As a victim of stalking to the stalker. | |
| And that to me is like they have blown their whole case completely. | |
| This is probably the reason why they took off the public prosecutor. | |
| Tell us the background in the Netherlands. | |
| How did the Netherlands handle the pandemic and where are they now? | |
| Yeah, so Holland is really following the German course or the German policy, but we're less restrictive. | |
| And I think that is mainly due to the difference in culture, but also because I think we pushed back quite effectively. | |
| So we stopped the mask mandate outside and we stopped the QR code outside. | |
| With only 2G, it's that you have to have either a recovery proof or a vaccination proof. | |
| And in Holland, it stayed also the testing. | |
| That system has been abolished, not entirely. | |
| So there is a relative freedom again. | |
| But you see that they want to turn up the restrictions already. | |
| And in September, I expect lockdown mentality again. | |
| And I understand that there are other leaders in France and other countries that are also being arrested. | |
| Yes, and that is a very good point to bring up. | |
| This is not a single case, not in my country. | |
| I think I'm one of the 20 people that normally go to demonstrations or organize demonstrations and do a video or vlogging event. | |
| Specifically, those kind of people are targeted. | |
| I've spoken to people from Belgium, from France, from Germany, from the United States, from Canada, from the UK. It is happening all over the world at the same time with the same kind of charges. | |
| So this is a protocol run through. | |
| This is not coming from a national level, but from an international level. | |
| I've been arrested a number of times during civil disobedience protests. | |
| In the summer of 2001, I was involved in a lawsuit against the United States Navy for bombing the island of Vieques, and I won the lawsuit. | |
| But a local judge who was corrupt refused to enforce my injunction. | |
| And I ended up at the request of the mayor of Villegas and a couple of other people doing a civil disobedience. | |
| And they put me in jail for 34 days during the summer of 2001 in a maximum security prison in Puerto Rico. | |
| People asked me how it was. | |
| And I say, honestly, it was one of the better occasions in my life because There was no cell phone. | |
| I didn't have to make decisions. | |
| I had a lot of books that I had access to. | |
| And I got to read books that I hadn't read before. | |
| And I've been sitting on my shelf for years. | |
| I got to play basketball every day. | |
| The food was pretty bad, but I don't mind bad food. | |
| It wasn't that bad. | |
| I did four days in solitary confinement, which was awful. | |
| But the rest of it was, you know, actually pretty tolerable. | |
| How was the jail in the Netherlands? | |
| Yeah, it's, I think, pretty similar because I can really confirm what you are saying. | |
| If you're in a jail, the personnel is very friendly. | |
| The detainees are very friendly. | |
| I was treated very well. | |
| I had a lot of books. | |
| I was writing a lot, making charges against all kinds of other violations. | |
| I was also put in isolation for, I think, almost seven days. | |
| Five of those were so-called quarantine rules. | |
| This is just a few weeks ago. | |
| They have not lifted those restrictions in jail. | |
| People in jail are the weakest group in society from a legal standpoint. | |
| So even those rights were abused on my door because I asked for a test that could show that I'm infected, but I am asymptomatic. | |
| Well, those tests don't exist, we all know. | |
| So they couldn't supply the sufficient test and they put on the form, he refused the test. | |
| I have not refused the test. | |
| And then they started to treat me as if I was a COVID patient and they printed COVID-19 on my cell door. | |
| So I filed actually three new court cases while I was in jail. | |
| Did they try to vaccinate you in the jail? | |
| No, they did not try to vaccinate me. | |
| But they tried to force me to wear a face mask, although I have a medical exemption. | |
| And what was really strange and a bit frightening there is that they also restricted the communication with my lawyer. | |
| They said, well, if you don't wear a face mask, you cannot talk to your lawyer. | |
| And of course, that is also a huge violation of the rights of a detainee. | |
| So it was a very interesting period. | |
| I don't think the face masks work, even if they work normally, I don't think they work at all if you have facial hair. | |
| Probably not. | |
| Do you have any good news? | |
| Do you see the orthodoxy crumbling, the fortress kind of getting cracks in it? | |
| Do you see any in the press or in the institutions? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| And that's why I'm so skeptical about the war in Ukraine. | |
| It came at a moment when the COVID narrative crumbled. | |
| People started falling out of the belief, out of the hypnosis, out of the mass formation. | |
| And it needed a new direction. | |
| And it got a new direction with blaming everything on the war in Ukraine. | |
| So now energy prices are going up. | |
| There is a huge hyperinflation. | |
| The food prices and the food scarcity is there. | |
| And then in the autumn, we switch back to the narrative of COVID. That's my expectation. | |
| And what's going to happen to you? | |
| Well, because we got so much public support, I received 10,000 physical letters in prison. | |
| The mail division of the prison couldn't cope. | |
| They had four people working around the clock to go through the mail because it has to be searched, all the mail you receive in prison. | |
| And I think that actually surprised them. | |
| There was so much attention in the media and so much outcry, public outcry, is that they had to release me. | |
| And that shows also the way forward. | |
| If we think about defense, we have to think about each other to form huge groups that can support each other when something goes wrong. | |
| Is there anything else we should talk about? | |
| We made a really huge win with that principled decision of the judge throwing the restrictions out just on the principle of freedom of speech. | |
| William, how can people support and follow you? | |
| Well, we have a media website. | |
| It's called viruswarheid.nl. | |
| It means virus truth. | |
| And there we have our news articles. | |
| We have the links to all the legal cases, to all the freedom of information requests, to all the guerrilla marketing poster actions, the demonstrations, etc. | |
| And of course, there's also a button where you can donate for the causes, because we believe in four pillars. | |
| The four pillars being filing court cases, informing the public, organizing demonstrations. | |
| And the last one that's not talked about enough is It's trying to get people to autonomy. | |
| Once they start caring for themselves, that's where we can start the resistance. | |
| William Engel, thank you so much for your leadership, for your courage and for joining us on the podcast. |