A court in Brussels has ordered the Belgian state to pay compensation to victims of the forced separation of mixed-race children from their families under Belgian colonial rule in the Congo.
The Court of Appeal overturned the earlier verdict from 2021, the news agency Belga and the public service RTBF reported, reports DPA.
The abduction of children of mixed race in the Congo, which was organized by the Belgian state and carried out with the help of the Roman Catholic Church, is a crime against humanity, the court ruled.
The Belgian state must compensate the five women who initiated the case, writes Belga.
An estimated 20.000 children of mixed race were forcibly taken from their families under Belgian colonial rule, reports RTBF.
The plaintiffs, five of them, were born in the Congo between 1946 and 1950 to Belgian fathers and Congolese mothers.
They were taken from their homes and forcibly placed in orphanages like most mixed-race children at the time, RTBF says.
Documents from the colonial archives presented by the lawyers of the plaintiffs showed that the children were taken from their mothers from their native villages by force, threats or fraud, although they were neither abandoned nor neglected, orphans or children whose parents are unknown.
Belgium controlled the territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1908 to 1960 and Burundi and Rwanda from 1922 to 1962.
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