A Brussels appeals court ruled on Monday that the Belgian state committed against the law against humanity within the case of 5 mixed-race women in Congo who were taken away from their Black moms in infancy.
In a landmark case addressing the Belgian 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 1000’s of mixed-race children. Known as “métis,” the youngsters were snatched away from families and placed in religious institutions and houses 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 in all 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 when unacceptable, was not “a part of a generalized or systematic policy, deliberately destructive, which characterizes against the law against humanity” and needed to be seen inside its context of European colonialism.
Monday’s decision also orders the state to pay damages of some 50,000 euros to every of the plaintiffs and Fernandes said it could help cover all the prices involved. “We didn’t wish to go for an ethical symbolic euro since it could amount to some kind of insult after the whole lot my mother went through,” she said.
The five women, who at the moment are of 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 within the United States, several statues of former King Leopold II, who’s blamed for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Africans during Belgium’s colonial rule, have been vandalized in Belgium, and a few have been removed.
In 2019, the Belgian government apologized for the state’s role in taking 1000’s of babies from their African moms. And for the primary time within the country’s history, a reigning king expressed regret 4 years ago for the violence carried out by the previous colonial power.
Lawyers said the five plaintiffs were all between the ages of two and 4 once they were taken away on the request of the Belgian colonial administration, in cooperation with local Catholic Church authorities.
According to legal documents, in all five cases the fathers didn’t exercise parental authority, and the Belgian administration threatened the women’ Congolese families with reprisals in the event that they refused to allow them to go.
According to the lawyers, the Belgian state’s strategy was aimed toward stopping interracial unions and isolating métis children, generally known as the “children of shame,” to be certain that they might not claim a link with Belgium later of their lives.
“The story at all times was: look, we now have done a lot good in Congo. But there may be also such a dark history,” said Fernandes.
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Associated Press author Sam Petrequin in London contributed to this report.
