BRUSSELS: The Belgian state was ordered Monday to pay reparations to five mixed-race women who were forcibly placed in an orphanage 70 years ago under a colonial-era practice that judges said constituted a crime against humanity.
Reversing an earlier ruling that found too much time had passed since the alleged wrongdoing, the Brussels appeals court said the women, now in their 70s, were abducted in “an inhumane act of persecution.”
The state’s conduct constituted a crime against humanity and as such was not subject to a statute of limitations, in line with a UN resolution adopted after World War II, it found.
“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 court said in a statement.
The case was the first in Belgium to shed light on the fate of biracial children born in the former Belgian colonies (DR Congo, Rwanda, Burundi), who are thought to number around 15,000, though there has never been an official count.
Most of the children born of a union between a black woman and a white man were not recognised by their father and were not allowed to mix with either whites or Africans.
As a result, many were placed under state guardianship and put in orphanages usually run by the Catholic Church.
The five women at the centre of the legal case said they were taken away from their families, brought up in a convent, mistreated and then abandoned when the Belgian Congo gained independence in 1960.
“The appellants, born in the Belgian Congo, were abducted from their respective mothers, without their consent, before the age of seven, by the Belgian State,” the court said.
This was “in execution of a plan to systematically search for and abduct children born to a black mother and a white father, raised by their mother in the Belgian Congo, solely because of their origins,” it added.
The women had been demanding initial compensation of 50,000 euros ($55,200) each.
“We won”, reacted Michele Hirsch, the lawyer of the plaintiffs, in a message to AFP.
Belgium apologised to the mixed-race descendants of its white colonists in 2019.
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