Malian musician Rokia Traoré, who was arrested in Rome last June over an international child custody dispute, will be handed over to Belgium in the coming days after Italy’s highest court rejected her appeal, her lawyer said on Wednesday.
Traoré, 50, a former goodwill ambassador for the United Nations’ refugee agency UNHCR, was arrested on 20 June at Rome’s Fiumicino airport under a European arrest warrant.
She had previously been sentenced to two years in prison in Belgium in October 2023 in connection with the custody of her daughter. A Belgian court had ordered her to surrender her nine-year-old daughter to the child’s father, Jan Goossens, who is a Belgian national.
“Rokia suffered an injustice. She was arrested without the Belgian criminal court hearing her voice. Now, the battle for Rokia’s rights moves to Brussels,” lawyer Maddalena Del Re said in a statement to Reuters.
Since her arrest in Italy, she has been in jail near the Italian capital, where she had flown to hold a concert outside the Colosseum.
According to Del Re, the Belgian legal process is at odds with Italian constitutional tenets and international agreements, as a verdict was delivered in the defendant’s absence.
Sven Mary, Goossens’s lawyer, said: “Rokia Traoré claimed de facto exclusive custody and has been denying her daughter contact with her father, and his entire family, for more than a five-and-a-half years now.
“Rokia Traoré’s rights have always been respected by the Belgian justice system: she was properly summoned, and was always able to defend herself correctly.
“However, for years she has chosen to ignore Belgian justice, not to be represented, as well as to flout Belgian family judgments that have tried to restore the balance between mother and father.”
The singer was initially detained on a Belgian arrest warrant in France in 2020 after getting off a plane in Paris.
“Despite the fact that I live in Mali, I have always answered to the Belgian justice system,” she said at the time, explaining that she had been travelling to Europe to attend a custody hearing.
She was released on certain conditions, and later travelled to Mali, where her daughter lives, via a private flight, disregarding instructions not to depart France until completion of her extradition proceedings to Belgium.
The daughter of a Malian diplomat, Traoré is a celebrity in a country that is best known in the west for its remarkable musicians.
As a singer-songwriter, she has pioneered an adventurous fusion of African and western styles. She has worked with the American theatre director Peter Sellars, and won the major French music award Victoire de la Musique. In 2019, she was guest director of the Brighton festival.
