Complaints about the way in which Belgian police search defendants in pretrial detention for the 2016 Brussels attacks, forcing them to strip completely, led to the suspension of the trial hearing for the attacks today, which left 32 victims deadly at the airport and the city subway. After a break of just over a week for the Christmas holidays, the first hearing of 2023 was suspended, as had happened on other occasions in this process, due to complaints by the lawyers against the transfer conditions and, this time, also for the refusal of the police to give explanations about their protocol.
Explanation of Different Lawyers
The head of the police unit that is in charge of escorting these defendants rejected the request made by the president of the court, Judge Laurence Massart, to explain before the room the protocol that they follow to take the defendants to the courthouse. defendants, according to local media reports. All this after, at the beginning of the session, several lawyers explained that this Tuesday the police once again carried out strip searches on their clients, despite the fact that a first instance judge prohibited, on December 29, that they could be searched. continue to carry out, thus estimating a defense request.
«We are in a State of no-Law. I did not imagine that the Belgian State would have the courage not to execute a decision of a judge for interim measures. I know that Belgium is the country of surrealism, but here we go in depth,” denounced lawyer Jonathan De Taye, who represents the defendant Ali El Haddad Asuffi. The order of December 29 states that this type of search with integral nudity supposes a degrading practice that violates the European Convention on Human Rights and, therefore, the judge gave the authorities a period of nine days, which ends this Saturday, to end this practice.
In protest, three of the seven defendants in pretrial detention (Salah Abdeslam, Bilal El Makhoukhi and Ali El Haddad Asufi) failed to appear today. In addition, several defense lawyers expressed their doubts about whether they continue to have the mandate of their clients to represent them, thus opening the door to the total stoppage of the trial, since, if a defendant is not present in court nor is he represented by a lawyer, the process cannot continue. Faced with this eventual situation, the Prosecutor’s Office and the lawyers for the victims of the 2016 attacks requested that the court seek mechanisms so that the trial can go ahead although, on behalf of the victims, the lawyer Alexandre Wilmotte called for “respect the rights of all parties.
To avoid a possible blockade, the president of the court ordered the police officers in charge of the transfers to be asked what their current protocol is and requested information, specifically, on the measures they had adopted this Tuesday. However, the refusal of the head of the Protection Directorate of the Belgian police to report on it before the room precipitated the end of a session in which substantive issues about the attacks in Brussels on March 22, 2016 were barely addressed. .
These attacks caused, firstly, 16 deaths with an explosion at the Zaventem airport, on the outskirts of the city, and then another 16 deaths with two detonations at the Maelbeek metro stop in the Belgian capital, some 200 meters from the headquarters of the European Commission. Almost seven years after these attacks, claimed by the Islamic State, the Belgian justice sits a total of ten defendants in the defendant’s dock, six of whom have already been sentenced in France for their participation in the 2015 Paris attacks. in which 130 people died.
This article is originally published on ultimahora.es.
