Singer Rokia Traoré, arrested last June in Italy following a conviction in Belgium in a case of non-representation of a child, will be handed over to Belgium in around ten days, announced her lawyer.
Rokia Traoré “will have to be transferred to Belgium within 10 days from today,” her Italian lawyer, Maddalena Claudia Del Re, said on Thursday in a message sent after a hearing before the court of call from Rome.
Two years of imprisonment
The singer and guitarist, who was sentenced in absentia in October 2023 to two years in prison in this case, was arrested in June at Fiumicino airport in Rome, where she had just landed to give a concert in the country.
The Brussels public prosecutor’s office then indicated that “the arrest of Ms. Traoré in Italy follows a decision of the Brussels criminal court of October 18, 2023 having sentenced the person concerned, by default, to a two-year prison sentence of charge of non-representation of a child” to the person having custody of the child.
Rokia Traoré had already been arrested in March 2020 in Paris under a European arrest warrant, because a Belgian court had ordered her to return her minor daughter to the child’s Belgian father, Jan Goossens. Despite a ban on leaving France, she flew with her daughter to Mali.
Besides her musical career, Rokia Traoré is also known for her support for refugees. She became a UN refugee ambassador in 2015.
