“Not respecting the 10,000 court decisions in asylum application files is an extremist position of the federal government”

“We still had two cases where ministers in office attacked the media head-on, and that is unprecedented”

This hierarchy of which human rights constitute the summit seems shaken to you today?

Quite. The law on the financing of political parties provides for sanctions against groups which express obvious hostility towards the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). However, in matters of migration, wishing for pushback as Theo Francken did (the N-VA representative had called for boats loaded with migrants to be turned back to Tunisia, Editor’s note) violates the ECHR. This should concern us.

“The government must finally understand that court decisions cannot be taken à la carte”

The pushbacks had previously been defended in 2016 by John Crombez, who was then president of the Flemish Socialists. Does the relativization of human rights go beyond the left-right divide?

We must go beyond the notion of left and right and qualify as extremist speeches which diminish human rights, public policies which call them into question, the weakening of trade union freedoms, and the independence of the judiciary. , etc. For example, not respecting the 10,000 court decisions in asylum application files in Belgium is an extremist position of the federal government, which currently associates the left and the right in power. Please note, the notion of extreme right remains relevant in certain cases. For example, the seventy-point plan of the Vlaams Blok (the former name of Vlaams Belang) at the time was clearly far-right. These measures then spread into the political sphere. Here we can clearly speak of far-right ideas.

Are far-right ideas and extremist speeches really more powerful than before? Certain comments that were acceptable a few decades ago are no longer acceptable today.

The political context has changed. When the Vlaams Blok made its electoral breakthrough (in 1991), the political reaction was unanimous. However, we see that some are now retweeting far-right personalities or trivializing their comments. Georges-Louis Bouchez (president of the MR) for example trivialized the position of Viktor Orban (Hungarian Prime Minister) aiming to question the ban on pushback. It’s a chipping away at the Charter of Democracy (text signed by the traditional French-speaking Belgian parties in 2002 and updated since, which organizes, among other things, the “sanitary cordon” against the far right, Editor’s note).

Several NGOs are concerned about the state of rights in Europe

Three ex-members of the far-right Walloon Chez Nous party moved to the MRwe learned this week. How do you interpret this? A good or bad thing?

In the current context, we can understand this strategy of inclusion as a sign of the porosity of far-right ideas in certain groups which, a priori, are not. Originally, the Liberal Party had been closely linked to the activity of the Human Rights League. This political group has long been attached to the defense of public freedoms. A few years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine that such people would be accepted into the ranks of the MR. It’s difficult to see the changes in this kind of party; how difficult it is to see that in four Flemish municipalities, Vlaams Belang is in power and how difficult it is to see that one of the European Commissioners comes from a far-right party. Our societies face a choice: liberal democracy and human rights or immersed in illiberal regimes and hate speech. It is not just an institutional choice but also a choice of civil society, the press, the legal world, and citizens.