A court has ordered Belgium to pay millions of dollars in compensation to five mixed-race women who were forcibly taken from their homes in the Belgian Congo as children, under a colonial-era practice that judges said was a “crime against humanity”.
The landmark ruling on Monday by the Brussels Court of Appeal came after years of legal battle by the aggrieved women. It sets a historic precedent for state-sanctioned abductions that saw thousands of children kidnapped from today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo because of their racial makeup.
