Belgian justice yesterday ordered the police to stop strip-searching those accused of the 2016 jihadist attacks in Brussels, after several months of controversy over the treatment of Salah Abdeslam, Mohamed Abrini and other people prosecuted for the worst. terrorist attacks in the history of the country, which caused 32 deaths and 340 injuries.
The Court of Cassation of Brussels, confirming a previous ruling that declared these practices “illegal”, ruled in favor of six of the nine affected, who had opposed this type of body searches after verifying “the ‘absence of legal basis for the genuflections imposed on the applicants during the searches practiced by the officers of the judicial police during the transfers’ between the prison and the Palace of Justice, and therefore ordered the Belgian State to ‘put an end’ to these practices. The judges also upheld the transport conditions complaint and ruled that tinted windows on police vehicles can only be used while driving.
The macro trial for the attacks – a double suicide attack committed early in the morning on the Brussels metro, on its way through the European quarter, and the capital’s airport – began in December. Some of the nine men sitting in the dock, like Abdeslam himself, already found guilty of terrorism and sentenced to life imprisonment in France, were transferred to Belgium to be tried.
The trial had to be adjourned because of disagreements over the booths where the defendants had to sit and their means of contact with their lawyers, and those booths had to be consciously redesigned to comply with the law.
As soon as the trial began, some of the defendants complained of being subjected to humiliating and degrading treatment during police searches, aimed at ensuring that they were not hiding any dangerous objects anywhere on their bodies, including their private parts. Abdeslam even refused to be transferred, an attempted boycott that led the judge to adjourn the interrogations pending resolution of the matter.
In the first instance, the judges concluded that these practices “seem to constitute a denigrating act” and as such would be prohibited by the European Convention on Human Rights, and found the defendants to be right. But the practice did not stop. The Belgian State appealed against the sentence and has constantly 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 of cassation recognizes that Belgian legislation provides for intimate searches to detect objects, but does not allow them to be done “systematically” or to “degenerate into a vexatious measure”, so it recommends “taking measures to preserve the shame of the people examined”.
The use of tinted glass must also be carried out “in a limited way”, according to yesterday’s ruling. From now on, Belgian judicial police must stop systematically asking defendants to strip and kneel to be searched, or face 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.
