The Belgian Justice has today ordered the police to stop strip-searching those accused of the 2016 jihadist attacks in Brussels on their knees after several months of controversy over the treatment of Salah Abdeslam, Mohamed Abrini and other people prosecuted for these events , which occurred four months after the attacks in Paris and which caused 32 deaths and 340 injuries, the worst in the country’s history.
The Brussels Court of Cassation, confirming a previous ruling that declared them “illegal”, has given reason to six of the nine affected who had opposed this type of body search after verifying “the absence of a legal basis for the genuflections imposed on the applicants during searches carried out by judicial police officers during transfers” between the prison and the courthouse and has therefore ordered the Belgian State to “put an end” to these practices. The judges have also supported the denunciation of the transport conditions and have ruled that blinding glass in police vehicles may only be used during displacement.
The trial for the attacks, a double suicide attack committed early in the morning in the Brussels metro as it passed through the European quarter and the airport of the capital, began last December. Some of the nine men sitting in the dock, including Abdeslam himself, have already been found guilty of terrorism in France and have been transferred to Belgium to stand trial for these attacks. The process had to be postponed due to discrepancies over the booths in which the defendants sit and the means of contact with their lawyers, which had to be consciously redesigned.
Right after the trial began, several of them reported humiliating and degrading treatment during police searches, designed to ensure that they do not hide any dangerous objects anywhere on their bodies, including their private parts. Abdeslam even refused to be transferred, which led the judge to postpone the interrogations pending the resolution of this matter. The first sentence occurred on December 29 of last year. In the first instance, the judges concluded that these practices “seem to constitute a demeaning act” and as such would be prohibited by the European Convention on Human Rights and agreed with the defendants.
The practice did not stop. The Belgian State appealed the sentence and has always defended these practices for security reasons, alleging the “potential danger” that exists in each transfer of the accused and the fact that “any object” can be used as a weapon. The court has recognized that Belgian law provides for intimate searches to detect objects but does not allow them to be done “systematically” or “to degenerate into a vexatious media”. To this end, they recall, “measures must be taken to preserve the modesty of the people examined.”
Also the use of tinted windows must be used “in a limited way”, according to the sentence known today. As of today, if the Belgian judicial police should stop systematically asking defendants to strip and get on their knees to be searched, or be required to pay a fine of 1,000 euros per person per day, up to a maximum of 25,000 euros per individual. These in-depth searches must be justified by “serious indications” of a risk of attack or evasion.
