A magistrate who committed a “gross and unacceptable error” that allowed Islamist Abdesalem Lassoued to commit October’s terror attack in Brussels will not face disciplinary action.
An internal investigation exonerated both the magistrate and his secretary, leading to a war of words with the governing liberal-conservative OpenVLD party.
Last year, it was revealed that the magistrate in question had failed to act on a request from Tunisia to have Lassoued extradited a year before the Islamist murdered two Swedish soccer supporters. The political backlash from the revelation led to the resignation of Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne last October.
Van Quickenborne said at the time that the tragedy was due to the magistrate’s “individual mistake. A gross, unacceptable mistake with dramatic consequences.”
Before that, Tim De Wolf, then Brussels public prosecutor, said that an “unfortunate combination of circumstances” within his office was to blame, pointing to understaffing and a heavy workload.
According to Vrt Nws, Tom Bauwens, the magistrate’s lawyer, maintained his client’s innocence, while slamming the manner in which the matter had been handled:
During the whole phase of the file [Lassoued’s] arriving at the public prosecutor’s office and being processed there, my client was on leave. It is and remains astonishing that they threw overboard every principle of presumption of innocence and hung him out to dry without having done even the bare minimum in reviewing the case.
“It is to be hoped that the media will employ as much energy and pages that they used at the time for slamming him, for the restoration of his reputation,” he concluded.
In a reply to Bauwens, Van Quickenborne expressed displeasure with the matter being seemingly swept under the rug.
A blind man can see that something has gone wrong. A terrorist could go about his business freely. He should have been deported long ago, because a file was left in a cupboard at the public prosecutor’s office in Brussels. That was a mistake with dramatic consequences.
Van Quickenborne said that while he “rightly, as the responsible minister,” resigned after that mistake, he added that “everyone has to look in the mirror, including the judiciary.”
He also found it odd that the investigation did not manage to throw up any failings or misdoings.
So what went wrong? What happened is not nothing. I believe in the rule of law and have always defended the independence of the judiciary. But independence is different from irresponsibility. You have to be responsible for the actions you take. A credible justice department is one that is humble and apologizes for what went wrong.
Continuing the to-and-fro, Bauwens, in reference to Van Quickenborne, said:
A humble minister who defends his principles in this way could then just as humbly perhaps argue that he spoke out of turn. And that something went wrong is obvious: understaffing and years of substandard treatment of essential structures of the state. One magistrate is not responsible for that.
Van Quickenborne was quick to hit back: “If there had been understaffing: how does one explain that 30 of the 31 files that year were processed and that one file [Lassoued’s] was not?”
On X, formerly Twitter, chairman of the OpenVLD Tom Ongena, supported his fellow party member, remarking:
‘The man was on leave’. I sincerely hope our safety does not depend on the justice department’s vacation planning. Vincent Van Quickenborne took his political responsibility, now it is up to Justice to learn lessons from the mistakes made.
Whatever the goings-ons within Belgium’s Justice Department at the time, it remains to be seen whether Ongena’s call will result in them being avoided in the future.
