January 2025
Brussels, Belgium

This policy amounted to a “crime against humanity”: on Monday December 02, 2024, the Belgian state was condemned as the former colonial power in the Congo (now the DRC) for the abduction from their mothers and forced placement of five mixed-race girls before independence in 1960, “a historic judgment” according to the plaintiffs.
Overturning the first-instance judgment handed down in 2021, the Brussels Court of Appeal ruled that the facts were not time-barred, and that these “systematic abductions” based on origin constituted “a crime against humanity”, in accordance with international law applicable in 1946, after the Second World War.
“We’ve won, it’s a total victory,” reacted Michèle Hirsch, the lawyer for the five women, now in their seventies.
“It’s the first time that a colonial state, Belgium in this case, has been condemned for a crime committed during colonization, qualified as a crime against humanity and therefore not time-barred”, explained the lawyer.

The Belgian state was ordered to compensate the plaintiffs’ moral prejudice and to pay them 50,000 euros each, the amount claimed in the complaint filed in 2020

This trial was the first in Belgium to shed light on the fate of mixed-race children born in former Belgian colonies (Congo, Rwanda, Burundi). Most of them were not recognized by their fathers, and were not allowed to mix with either whites or Africans.

The five plaintiffs were all born between 1945 and 1950 to a white man and a black woman in the former Belgian colony, now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
At the age of two, three or four, they were forcibly removed from their maternal families and placed in institutions, generally run by the Catholic Church, where they claim to have been abused.
One of the plaintiffs, Simone Ngalula, who was taken to a convent with her siblings at the age of two because her widowed mother was deemed unable to care for them, felt that the ruling finally restored her “dignity”.

– “Long fight” –
“Because at our age, are we going to go back to childhood and start life all over again? No,” the 74-year-old Belgian explained to AFP.
Her “sister” in misfortune, 78-year-old Léa Tavares Mujinga, placed in the same institution as her in Congo, said she was happy to have “reached the end of a long struggle”.

According to their defense, the practice of forced placement was part of “the policy of racial segregation and abduction instituted by the Belgian colonial state”, and deprived these children of their identity. “Their quest for identity is still prevented to this day”, asserted Me Hirsch at the hearing in September.
On Monday, the Court of Appeal noted that the five women had been “abducted from their respective mothers, without their consent, before the age of seven, by the Belgian State in execution of a systematic search and abduction plan” targeting mixed-race children “solely because of their origins”.
“Their abduction is an inhuman act of persecution constituting a crime against humanity under the principles of international law recognized by the Statute of the Nuremberg Tribunal, incorporated into international law”, it stresses. The ruling cites a UN resolution confirming these legal principles, adopted in December 1946.
In 2019, the Belgian government acknowledged the “targeted segregation” suffered by these mestizos from the former colonies, and deplored the “loss of identity” with the separation of siblings, including at the time of repatriation to Belgium after Congo’s independence.

For the plaintiffs, this apology was not enough, and had to be followed by compensation. In their petition, they deplored the fact that “the reparation law so long awaited by the victims has never seen the light of day”.
The Belgian state was the colonial power in Congo for half a century (1908-1960), after an initial period of occupation (1885-1908) during which King Leopold II made this immense Central African country his personal property.

Humaniterre with AFP