Luc Hennart will always remember the day the drains collapsed in Brussels’ Palais de Justice — a gigantic 19th-century building towering over the Belgian capital.
An employee rushed into his office and urged him to come out quickly, recalled Hennart, a now-retired judge who presided over one of the courts housed in the Palais.
“He smelled — excuse me — like shit. And he said ‘there are millions of flies in the evidence room.’”
A gaping hole had opened at the end of a corridor. “It was extraordinary . . . The drains had collapsed . . . everything just collapsed. It was a huge problem,” Hennart said.
The courthouse was inaugurated in 1883 during the reign of King Leopold II, the Belgian monarch infamous for his brutal colonial rule over Congo. The neoclassical building remains an apt symbol of Belgium’s dysfunctional justice system — with its history of delays, miscarriages of justice and deaths that could have been prevented.
Leaky pipes were not the only issue Hennart was grappling with back in 2017.
Evidence seized in criminal cases had been stored in the Palais de Justice’s cellars, which were humid and infested with mould. Hennart temporarily shut the evidence rooms for health and safety reasons, with employees obliged to wear hazmat suits when retrieving evidence. This resulted in delays and a “certain disorganisation”, he said.
While most boxes with seized material have since been moved out of the Palais, other Belgian courthouses are still experiencing similar problems. In the southern city of Nivelles, a murder trial was dismissed last year because the file had become unreadable due to humidity and fungus.
“It’s crazy, an unbelievable story,” said Jean-Philippe Mayence, the lawyer of the main suspect in the case, which dates back to 1999.
Procedural delays also affected Belgium’s largest terrorism trial after suicide attacks in 2016 left 32 people dead and hundreds injured.
The surviving terrorists were apprehended after a series of security blunders: the perpetrators were part of the same Isis cell that had massacred 130 people in Paris four months before.
In 2023, another deadly attack took place in Brussels, which critics say could have been prevented if Belgian authorities had acted in time.
Abdesalem Lassoued, a Tunisian national who had been convicted for attempted murder in his home country, opened fire on Swedish football fans on their way to see their team play in Brussels. Two people were killed and Lassoued was shot dead by police when attempting to flee the scene. Isis claimed responsibility for that attack as well.
It later emerged that Tunisian authorities had requested Lassoued’s extradition as early as 2022, issuing an arrest warrant via Interpol.
But a Belgian audit found that the Tunisian extradition request was left unanswered. The document was retrieved from a filing cabinet in the Brussels prosecutor’s office, with a Post-it note that read: “Which qualification — federal justice police or local police?”
The auditors concluded that the prosecutor’s “work processes are not always formalised due to a lack of internal controls and a high workload”.
Dimitri de Beco, a Brussels-based criminal lawyer, deplored the Belgian justice system’s “catastrophic” lack of funding and staff.
De Beco represented a family who successfully sued a Swiss priest, Frédéric Abbet, for sexually abusing their son. Abbet maintained his innocence throughout the protracted legal battle, which ended in 2017 with a five-year conviction, including three in prison. But the victim’s family then found out that Belgian authorities had failed to transfer Abbet to a Swiss prison and that he was living freely in his home country.
“You think it’s over. But no, it’s not over,” said Florence Peeters, the mother of the victim. “The same helplessness, the same sadness. A feeling of injustice . . . The whole process, what was it all for?”
It was only after Swiss media published an article about the case in 2020 that Belgian authorities sent the paperwork to Switzerland, resulting in Abbet being put behind bars.
The Brussels prosecutor’s office did not respond to a request for comment. The Swiss authority responsible for enforcing prison sentences said it would not comment on individual cases.
The European Commission last year said Belgium’s underfunded and understaffed justice system was “one of the causes for the excessive length of judicial proceedings”. The Belgian college of courts and tribunals says that 43 per cent more judges are needed to keep up with the workload.
The Brussels prosecutor’s office on Monday criticised “the underfunding of justice and the lack of rapid response from the federal government”. It said it would stop participating in certain hearings and focus on some areas of economic and financial crime.
Prosecutors and prison guards are also scarce, according to Pierre Vanderheyden, head of the college of public prosecutors. As a result, investigations are sidelined for months, the public prosecutor’s office cannot process all incoming cases, and prison sentences are not properly executed, he said.
FT series: Broken Justice
This is the second article in a series on Europe’s chronically underfunded justice system that risks undermining the rule of law and scaring off investors.
Part 1 How Europe let its courts decay
Part 2 ‘Millions of flies in the evidence room’ — inside Belgium’s Justice Palace
Part 3 The rise and fall of the ‘Italian torpedo’
Part 4 ‘Lawfare’ in Spain — the case against the Sanchez family
The situation is further aggravated by the rising influence of organised crime rings, Vanderheyden said. “Criminal organisations have reached a size that destabilises the rule of law, by investing in sectors of the real economy, and through corruption.”
Back at the Palais de Justice, the overall decay continues: the upper floors remain unsafe due to crumbling ceilings, buckets line hallways to collect rainwater, and the internal metal structure of the building is rusting, according to Hennart, the retired judge.
Metal scaffolding has enveloped the building since the mid-1980s, and at one point, even that needed its own scaffolding for repair work.
Hennart remains sceptical about Belgium’s ability to restore what was once Europe’s largest courthouse — with the facade work now scheduled to be completed in 2030.
“We are going to do a beautiful facade, but behind the facade, we will find ourselves with a series of problems that continue.”
