Belgian court rules against state in a landmark case addressing its colonial past

BRUSSELS -- A Brussels appeals court ruled on Monday that the Belgian state committed a crime against humanity in the case of five mixed-race women who were taken away from their Black mothers in infancy in a landmark case addressing the nation's colonial past in Africa.

The five women fought a legal battle over some some six years to make Belgium recognize responsibility for the suffering of thousands of mixed-race children. Known as “métis," the children were snatched away from families and placed in religious institutions and homes by Belgian authorities that ruled Congo from 1908 to 1960.

A lower court had first dismissed their challenge in 2021 but they appealed.

“It is deliverance for my mother now that she finally has closure,” said Monique Fernandes, the daughter of Monique Bintu Bingi, one of the five plaintiffs. “She finally has it recognized as crime against humanity,” Fernandes told The Associated Press.

The initial ruling had said that the policy, even if unacceptable, was not “part of a generalized or systematic policy, deliberately destructive, which characterizes a crime against humanity” and had to be seen within its context of European colonialism.

Monday's decision also orders the state to pay damages of some 50,000 euros to each of the plaintiffs and Fernandes said it would help cover all the costs involved. "We did not want to go for a moral symbolic euro since it would amount to some sort of insult after everything my mother went through,” she said.

The five women, who are now in their 70s and 80s, filed their lawsuit in 2020 amid growing demands for Belgium to reassess its colonial past in Congo, Rwanda and Burundi.

In the wake of protests against racial inequality in the United States, several statues of former King Leopold II, who is blamed for the deaths of millions of Africans during Belgium’s colonial rule, have been vandalized in Belgium, and some have been removed.

In 2019, the Belgian government apologized for the state’s role in taking thousands of babies from their African mothers. And for the first time in the country’s history, a reigning king expressed regret four years ago for the violence carried out by the former colonial power.

Lawyers said the five plaintiffs were all between the ages of 2 and 4 when they were taken away at the request of the Belgian colonial administration, in cooperation with local Catholic Church authorities.

According to legal documents, in all five cases the fathers did not exercise parental authority, and the Belgian administration threatened the girls’ Congolese families with reprisals if they refused to let them go.

According to the lawyers, the Belgian state’s strategy was aimed at preventing interracial unions and isolating métis children, known as the “children of shame,” to make sure they would not claim a link with Belgium later in their lives.

“The story always was: look, we have done so much good in Congo. But there is also such a dark history," said Fernandes.

___

Associated Press writer Sam Petrequin in London contributed to this report.