A Belgium court has mandated the government to pay reparations to five mixed-race women who were forcibly removed from their families in the colonial-era Belgian Congo.
The women, who are now in their 70s, were forcefully taken from their mothers when they were young children and placed in orphanages under a state policy.
The court further said the government had a “plan to systematically search for and abduct children born to a black mother and a white father”.
However, judges had on Monday, December 2, judges called this a crime against humanity and said the kidnappings were “an inhumane act of persecution”.
In 2019, the Belgium government issued a formal apology to an estimated 20,000 victims of forced family separations in DR Congo, Burundi and Rwanda.
The women in question;
Monique Bitu Bingi, Léa Tavares Mujinga, Noëlle Verbeken, Simone Ngalula and Marie-José Loshi launched a legal case for compensation in 2021.
They had all been taken by the state when they were under the age of seven and placed in orphanages mostly managed by the Catholic Church.
Their legal fight became victorious on Monday in the Brussels Court of Appeal which overturned an earlier court’s ruling which found that too much time had elapsed for them to be eligible for reparations.
As the court ruled the state’s actions a crime against humanity, this removed any statute of limitations previously there.
“The court orders the Belgian State to compensate the appellants for the moral damage resulting from the loss of their connection to their mother and the damage to their identity and their connection to their original environment,” the judges declared.
The women had originally asked for an initial payment of €50,000 (£41,400).
This is the first case in Belgium to have spotlighted the estimated 20,000 children born to white settlers and local black women who were forcibly removed from their families during the 1940s and 1950s.
Back then, majority of the white fathers refused to recognise their mixed-race children or acknowledge paternity, and the children in turn, did not automatically receive Belgian nationality. As a result, they were taken into state care and placed in Church-run orphanages, where in many cases they experienced further abuse.
The Catholic church had already apologised to the victims for its part in the scandal back in 2017 and eventually, in 2019, the Belgian government also apologised for its involvement as part of a “step towards awareness and recognition of this part of our national history”.
