Possible Impediments to Justice for Colonial Crimes: A Belgian Perspective

Justice for colonial wrongs is a difficult matter. Collective or individual responsibilities have rarely been established in history. This has been described as an 'accountability gap'. While this gap may partly be due to circumstantial and factual reasons, it is also the result, specifically, of legal impediments that are faced by victims in their quest for justice. Such impediments exist on the plane of international(ized) justice, at the level of former colonies, as well as in the domestic legal order of former colonial states.

This practitioner paper takes the latter perspective as a starting point. Drawing from their experience in assisting victims of colonial crimes and their families in Belgium, the authors seek to examine the 'accountability gap' from the perspective of the criminal law and practice of a former colony. They do so by presenting a selected series of concrete legal impediments that victims may face in litigating at the Belgian level, as well as potential solutions to tackle them.

The analysis is structured in four sections, each addressing one specific, possible legal impediment. Firstly, the characterization of colonial wrongs as war crimes is examined, with a discussion on legal nature of colonial conflicts under international humanitarian law (IHL) and possible implications in terms of criminal prosecutions in Belgium (section 2). Secondly, the paper addresses the non-application of statutory limitations for international crimes and its contours in the Belgian experience (section 3). Thirdly, the authors turn to the Belgian experience in establishing parliamentary commissions of inquiry on colonial wrongs, and the impact that such process may have in the context of criminal proceedings (section 4). Fourthly and finally, in the light of recent legislative developments, the paper leaves the domain of individual responsibility and turn to novel perspectives on the criminal liability of Belgium as a State (section 5).