Luc Robert

Crime, criminal justice and criminology in Belgium

For criminologists, Belgium is at once an interesting and a very complex country. Belgium is one of the first European countries where criminology became institutionalized in the universities. As for criminal justice, in many ways Belgium can be situated in the European middle. One feature of Belgium is its institutional complexity, with a push towards devolving decision-making powers from the federal level to its entities. This recently led to the longest period of post-election government negotiations in a democratic country: for more than 500 days, the country had no real federal government. Current agreements on a future sixth reform of the federal state include devolving matters of justice to the regions and language-based communities. Moreover, since the mid-1990s Belgium has been going through a period of unprecedented criminal justice reform, in various key areas such as policing, the prison system and victim policy. However, the persistent overcrowding of Belgian prisons has hampered various reform efforts and has determined the course of penal policy in recent decades.

Conditional Release in Belgium: How Reforms Have Impacted Recall

Following the Dutroux case in 1996, the Belgian parole system was thoroughly reformed in 1998 and 2006. Decision-making was transferred from the Minister of Justice to multidisciplinary “Sentence Implementation Courts”, supervision and follow up of conditionally released prisoners was tightened and the proportion of recalls increased. Recall of conditional release hence results from the interaction between three main parties: the offender, the supervising probation officer (“justice assistant” in Belgium) and the Sentence Implementation Court who takes the final decision. This paper looks into the consequences of these reforms for two of these parties: the justice assistants, who struggle to keep their professional discretion in the decision to recall, and prisoners, who increasingly turn away from conditional release, thus avoiding recall to prison altogether.

The Future of Europe in Prisons

In this concluding chapter, the editors identify a number of key issues that emerge from the chapters of the book and raise further questions about the evolution and developments of European institutions and the impact these institutions may have on domestic prison systems. This provides some key topics of a Europe in prisons research agenda. A number of contemporary developments are also touched upon, because they raise questions about the legitimacy of European institutions at large, including what happens in the sphere of imprisonment. Some of these developments are still ongoing; many questions remain present, if not in a direct manner, then at least in a latent way, with the potential to resurface at any time.

Europe in Belgian Prisons: Assessing the Impact of the Council of Europe Anti-Torture Committee and the European Court of Human Rights

In this chapter we assess how the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT), a European actor with preventive objectives, and the European Court of Human Rights ( ECtHR), an actor whose work is more reactive in nature, have impacted upon prisons in Belgium. The chapter begins with an in-depth description of the CPT’s visits to Belgium, with a particular focus on the most pressing issues the CPT addressed in its reports and the reaction of the Belgian government to those observations and recommendations. Three areas of comments are singled out: physical conditions in prisons, social conditions (including (the consequences of) industrial actions by prison officers) and safeguards against ill-treatment. Secondly, the focus is on the European Convention for Human Rights (ECHR) and its prime mechanism of application, the ECtHR. The chapter describes relevant judgments by the ECtHR involving interned prisoners in Belgium.