A Belgian court has ordered the government to pay compensation Five women of mixed race were forcibly removed from their families in the colonial-era Belgian Congo.
The women, now in their 70s, were taken from their mothers as infants and placed in orphanages under state policy.
“The government has a plan to systematically seek out and abduct children born to black mothers and white fathers,” the court said.
A judge on Monday called it a crime against humanity and said the abductions were an “inhuman act of violence”.
The Belgian government issued a formal apology to the estimated 20,000 victims of forced family separation in DR Congo and Burundi and Rwanda in 2019.
DR Congo was colonized by Belgium from 1908 to 1960.
Monique Bitu Bingi, Lia Tavares Muzinga, Noelle Verbeken, Simone Ngalula and Marie-José Loshi launched a legal case for compensation in 2021.
They were all taken in by the state under the age of seven and placed mainly in orphanages run by the Catholic Church.
Bitu Bingi previously told the AFP news agency: “We are devastated. It’s easy to apologize, but when you do something you have to take responsibility for it.”
His legal battle was successful at the Brussels Court of Appeal on Monday, which overturned an earlier court ruling that found too much time had passed to qualify for compensation.
As the court ruled that the state’s actions were crimes against humanity, it removed any statute of limitations.
“The court orders the Belgian state to compensate the appellant for the loss of contact with his mother and the moral damage due to the damage to his identity and his connection to his original environment,” the judge said.
The women had asked for an initial payment of €50,000 (£41,400).
This is the first case to highlight the estimated 20,000 in Belgium Children born to white settlers and local black women who were forcibly removed from their families in the 1940s and 1950s.
Most white fathers refused to recognize or acknowledge paternity of their mixed-race children, and the children did not automatically receive Belgian nationality.
As such he was taken into intensive care and placed in church-run orphanages, where in many cases he endured further abuse.
In 2017, the Catholic Church apologized to the victims for its part in the scandal.
And in 2019, the Belgian government apologized for its involvement as part of “a step towards awareness and recognition of this part of our national history”.
