BRUSSELS (AFP) - Belgium's far-right Vlaams Blok was branded racist in a supreme court ruling that will force one of Europe's most successful anti-immigrant parties to relaunch itself.
The supreme court upheld a verdict by a lower court in April that found the party to be guilty of "permanent incitement to segregation and racism".
The top court rejected all 21 arguments put forward by the Vlaams Blok in an appeal against the April ruling by a court in Ghent, saying that freedom of speech had its limits under tough new anti-racism legislation.
The verdict was met with applause from anti-racism activists inside the packed courtroom but gasps from party supporters.
Party officials had warned that the failure of the appeal would spell financial ruin for the Vlaams Blok with the loss of 250,000 euros (325,000 dollars) in annual public funding.
"What happened in Brussels today is unique in the Western world: never has a so-called democratic regime outlawed the country's largest political party," Vlaams Blok leader Frank Vanhecke said in a statement.
"Today, our party has been killed, not by the electorate but by the judges.
"We will establish a new party. This one Belgium will not be able to bury; it will bury Belgium," he said.
The Vlaams Blok wants the richer, Dutch-speaking region of Flanders to secede from Belgium, whose other main community is French-speaking. The two populations co-exist in an uneasy federal partnership.
The party said after weekend talks that, if it lost the appeal, it would relaunch itself under the name "Vlaams Blok+" or "Vlaams Belang" (The Flemish Interest).
It said it would no longer advocate the wholesale expulsion of non-white immigrants.
But the party vowed to continue its campaign against immigration and to demand independence for Flanders, whose main city is the wealthy and cosmopolitan port of Antwerp, the world capital of diamond-cutting.
The city has large North African and Orthodox Jewish minorities. It has seen a spate of anti-Semitic attacks recently, while a radical Arab group has been staging vigilante patrols of North African neighbourhoods.
Two opinion polls last month placed the Vlaams Blok as the most popular party in the region, ahead of the Christian Democrats, after it came second in June regional elections.
In national elections in May last year, the Vlaams Blok posted the best performance in its 26-year history by gaining three more seats in Belgium's 150-seat parliament to take its tally to 18.
But despite its poll success, the Blok has been kept out of power by a political "cordon sanitaire" of isolation by mainstream parties.
Under the relaunch, which is planned for this coming weekend, the new-look Vlaams Blok plans only a slight modification to its unabashed xenophobia.
Instead of pushing for the forcible expulsion of non-European immigrants, in future it will demand the departure of minorities "who reject, deny or fight against culture and European values like the separation of church and state, freedom of expression and equality between men and women", it said.
"We are a modern party, of the nationalist right. We are now the reference point in Europe," the Vlaams Blok's charismatic leading light, Filip Dewinter, told Monday's Het Laatste Nieuws daily.
The party has led a resurgence of the extreme right across Europe including the Austrian Freedom Party of Joerg Haider, Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front in France and murdered Dutch firebrand Pim Fortuyn.
The Vlaams Blok's rise has been helped by public antipathy to the ruling elite in Antwerp, whose council was forced to resign en masse over a corruption scandal in March last year.
11/09/2004 - 18:35 GMT - AFP