Belgian court orders the state to pay damages to five mixed-race women who were removed from their mothers as children in colonial-era Congo.
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The Belgian state has been found guilty of crimes against humanity for the kidnapping of five mixed-race women when they were children in Congo under Belgium's colonial rule.
The women, now in their 70s, were victims of "systematic kidnapping" by the state when they were removed from their mothers as young children due to their mixed-race origins and placed in Catholic orphanages, the Brussels Court of Appeal said on Monday.
The court said the Belgian state had a "plan to systematically search for and abduct children born to a black mother and a white father".
"Their abduction is an inhumane and persecutory act constituting a crime against humanity under the principles of international law," the court said in a statement.
The state was ordered by the court to pay the five women €50,000 each for the moral damages they suffered, and cover more than €1 million in legal costs.
The women — Monique Bitu-Bingi, Noëlle Verbeken, Léa Tavares Mujinga, Simone Ngalula and Marie-José Loshi — won their legal battle on Monday after the appeals court overturned a 2021 ruling that had determined that the case was time-barred.
"This is a victory and a historic judgment," Michèle Hirsch, one of the lawyers for the five women, told Belgian media. "It is the first time in Belgium and probably in Europe that a court has condemned the Belgian colonial state for crimes against humanity."
In 2019, the Belgian government apologised for the first time for the abduction of thousands of "metis" children — those of mixed European and African heritage — in Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) between 1959 and 1962.
The country was a Belgian colony from 1908 to 1960.
Belgium's foreign affairs ministry, which represented the government in the case, has not publicly commented on the ruling.