Mehdi Nemmouche, the French jihadi who has been extradited to Belgium to stand trial for the massacre in Brussels' Jewish Museum on May 24, will be defended by far-right lawyers.

Anti-racism website Resistances.be last week published a photo of Belgian lawyers Henri Laquay and Sebastien Courtoy apparently performing the quenelle - the inverted Nazi salute - along with antisemitic French comedian Dieudonné Mbala Mbala in 2012.

In an interview with Le Soir, a mainstream Belgian newspaper, Laquay said that there was nothing "Nazi" about the quenelle: "It is merely giving the finger to the system, in a peaceful and humoristic way."

In National Socialist Germany, "the system" was code for the allegedly "Jewish" Weimar Republic.

It is in use again in European far-right political circles to describe Western democracy, Nato and the European Union.

Laquay's father, who had the same first and surname and was also a lawyer, was a far-right politician in the 1990s and a legal adviser to the Belgian National Front.

Laquay Jr himself ran as a Belgian National Front candidate in 1999. He is the founder of Jus et Patria, a international association of "nationalist" lawyers. The far-right, fundamentalist Catholic lawyer Wallerand de Saint-Just d'Autingues, an adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen and a defender of Serbian war criminals, is a member.

Courtoy has not been directly involved in politics but has repeatedly defended far-right politicians in Belgium, including Laurent Louis, who was tried for slandering several public personalities. A one-time member of the conservative People's Party, Louis later embraced antisemitism, befriended Dieudonné and even joined a Belgian Islamist party.

Both Laquay and Courtoy have defended Islamist organisations and far-right militants involved in abusing Jews or Israeli organisations.