This article was originally published in English
A Belgian court orders the state to pay damages to five mixed-race women who were taken from their mothers as children in colonial-era Congo.
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The Belgian state was found guilty of crimes against humanity for the kidnapping of five mixed-race women when they were children in Congo under Belgium’s colonial rule.
These women, now in their seventies, were victims of “systematic kidnapping” by the state when they were taken from their mothers as children because of their mixed race and placed in Catholic orphanages, declared the Brussels Court of Appeal this Monday.
The Court declared that the Belgian State had a “plan to systematically search and kidnap children born to a black mother and a white father “.
“Their kidnapping is an inhumane act of persecution constituting a crime against humanity under the principles of international law “, the court said in a statement.
The court ordered the state to pay the five women 50,000 euros each for the moral damage they suffered and to cover more than a million euros in legal costs.
The women – Monique Bitu-Bingi, Noëlle Verbeken, Léa Tavares Mujinga, Simone Ngalula and Marie-José Loshi – won their legal battle on Monday after the appeals court overturned a 2021 decision that had determined the case was prescribed.
“This is a victory anda historic judgment“, Michèle Hirsch, one of the lawyers for the five women, told Belgian media. “This is the first time in Belgium and probably in Europe that a court has condemned the Belgian colonial state for crimes against humanity. “.
The Belgian Foreign Ministry, which represented the government in the case, has not publicly commented on the ruling.
In 2019, the Belgian government apologized for the first time for the kidnapping of thousands of “mixed race” children – those with mixed European and African heritage – in the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) between 1959 and 1962.
Then in 2020, and for the first time in the history of Belgium, a reigning king expressed his regret for the violence committed by the former colonial power.
In a letter addressed to the President of the DRC, Félix Tshisekedi, published in June 2020, the day of the 60th anniversary of the independence of the African country, King Philippe of Belgium expressed his “deep regrets” for the “acts of violence and cruelty” and the “suffering and humiliation” inflicted on the Belgian Congo.
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