Belgium's Métis Children: From a 2019 Apology to a 2024 Crimes-Against-Humanity Ruling

Under Belgian colonial rule in Congo, Rwanda and Burundi, children born to Belgian settlers and local African mothers, known as Métis, were treated as a specific administrative problem: officials removed an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 of them from their mothers, in some cases falsifying records to list their fathers as unknown, and placed them in institutions run largely by Catholic religious orders, often hundreds of kilometers from their home communities. Many were separated from siblings, denied contact with their families, and in a significant number of cases left without Belgian nationality, rendering them effectively stateless as the colonies moved toward independence around 1959 to 1962.

The Belgian state’s first formal reckoning came decades later. On April 5, 2019, Prime Minister Charles Michel addressed Parliament directly: “In the name of the federal government, I present my apologies to the metis of the Belgian colonial era and their families for the injustices and the sufferings they have endured. I hope that this solemn moment will be an additional step toward an awareness and knowledge of this part of our national history.” Belgium’s federal parliament simultaneously adopted a resolution recognizing the removals as “targeted segregation” and “forced removals.” The apology, delivered before dozens of former abductees who traveled to hear it, stopped short of committing to compensation, and the Belgian government continued to resist paying it in the years since.

Five Métis women, Marie-Josée Loshi, Noëlle Verbeken, Léa Tavares Mujinga, Simone Ngalula and Monique Bintu Bingi, all born in Belgian Congo between 1948 and 1952 and taken from their mothers as children, sued the Belgian state in 2020 to force the issue. A Brussels court rejected their claims in 2021, but on December 2, 2024, the Brussels Court of Appeal reversed that decision, ruling that Belgium’s “systematic racial segregation” of Métis children was inhumane, constituted an act of persecution, and amounted to a crime against humanity, the first such finding in a case brought by Métis victims of Belgian colonialism. The court ordered 250,000 euros in combined compensation for the five women, for what it described as the moral damage of losing their connection to their mothers, their identity and their original environment, over the Belgian government’s argument that the policy, however discriminatory by today’s standards, had not constituted a crime under the law at the time it was carried out.