Articles 19 to 21 guarantee the freedom of religion. Article 19 protects the freedom of religion and the right to exercise it publicly. It also guarantees the freedom of speech by stipulating that everyone has the right to express his or her opinion freely. However, Article 19 also determines that abuses of these freedoms can be punished, a principle which is controversially applied in the Belgian Holocaust denial law, which made it an offence to publicly "deny, minimise, justify or approve of the genocide committed by the German National Socialist regime during the Second World War".