Tag: belgium

“A First Victory Against Big Tech!” – Belgian Lawmaker Awarded €27k From Meta For Unfair Facebook ‘Shadowban’

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has been ordered to pay damages in the sum of €27,000 to a Belgian right-wing lawmaker for unfairly limiting his reach on the social media platform, otherwise known as “shadowbanning.”

The Antwerp Court of Appeal ruled on Monday in favor of Tom Vandendriessche, an MEP standing for reelection as the lead candidate for the Flemish separatist party, Vlaams Belang, in Belgium.

The court held that Facebook had unfairly censored Vandendriessche’s account, which currently boasts 234,000 followers, back in February 2021 and had failed to act “in accordance with the principle of good faith” and did not offer “sufficient procedural guarantees” for users who were subjected to such measures. His account was subsequently blocked in May of the same year.

Meta claimed it had acted in accordance with its community guidelines and accused the Belgian lawmaker of posting inappropriate content on the platform, leading to the shadowban. However, Vandendriessche was informed by the social media giant the ban had been lifted at the end of 2021, a claim he contested, as his organic reach remained artificially low.

No ruling was made on this claim, as the court held there was insufficient evidence to prove the account remained subject to adverse measures.

The judgment overruled the court of first instance, which ruled that Belgian courts did not have jurisdiction to decide on the matter, leading to an appeal to the higher court by Vandendriessche.

In a statement following the ruling, the Vlaams Belang politician hailed “a first victory against Big Tech,” insisting that “anonymous technocrats should never dictate what can be said and heard.”

“I hope that this ruling makes it clear to Facebook that they can no longer censor me, and many citizens with me, without consequences,” he added.

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Belgium and Hungary Launch Controversial Digital IDs, Vaccine Passport, Ahead of EU Regulations

Belgium and Hungary are leading the way in launching digital ID wallets ahead of EU’s eIDAS (“electronic identification and trust services”) 2.0 regulation and EUDI Wallet coming into force later this month.

In Belgium, the MyGov.be app, covering all of the country’s federal public services, was launched on Tuesday, with the government promoting the digital identity as “simplifying” the use of its services, and “making life easier.”

In other words, the authorities there are playing the convenience card – while downplaying the risks that come with this type of centralization of people’s identities.

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Belgian Government Will Intervene In Cases Where Prostitutes Refuse Sexual Acts Too Often

A new law in Belgium celebrated by activists for providing a “labour contract” to prostitutes will also enable their pimps to punish them with a government mediator if they refuse sex more than 10 times in a six-month period. The Belgian Parliament voted for the law on May 3, with 93 in favor, zero opposed, and 33 abstentions.  

The legislation is being touted as a win by UTSOPI, the Belgium Union of Sex Workers, which had lobbied extensively for the legislation. The law outlines that prostitutes will receive health insurance, a pension, maternity and holiday leave, and unemployment benefits. Their pimps will be forced to provide them with a “safety button” to use for emergencies.

Their website claims that the law “is a historic step in the battle for sex workers’ rights” and will create a “respectful, fair relationship” between prostitutes and their pimps, with UTSOPI spokesperson Daan Bauwens telling media that he believes “Belgium is really demonstrating that it aims to protect sex workers, regardless of any moral judgements about the profession people may have.”

Prostitutes are to be granted “rights” to refuse sexual acts, stop sexual acts, perform sexual acts in the manner they prefer, and refuse to sit behind Amsterdam-style windows (public facing windows where prostitutes are on display). However, should a prostitute use these “rights” 10 times within six months, their pimp can then call on a government mediator to intervene.

All pimps must have a registered office and apply to the Belgian government for approval to offer contracts to prostitutes. The contracts will be disguised as hotel-restaurant-café (HoReCa) contracts so that prostitutes can remain anonymous.

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The mystery of missing ‘French Madeleine McCann’: Estelle Mouzin disappeared aged nine on her way to school amid fears she was snatched by ‘Ogre of Ardennes’ killer… but her body has never been found

Over a span of more than 15 years, a series of killings of women and young girls haunted parts of France and Belgium, but perhaps none more than the murder of nine-year-old Estelle Mouzin – France’s Madeline McCann.

Between 1987 and 2003, at least 11 people disappeared across the region, with several of the cases seeming – at least at first – to be unconnected.

The first woman disappeared in Auxerre, in December 1987. The second vanished 90 miles away in Vitry-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, in 1988. 

Another woman went missing in Auxerre that same year, but then more vanished further north in Châlons-en-Champagne (1988) and Charleville-Mézières (1989. Then one in Saint-Servais in Belgium, then another in Rezé, over in the West of France.

After a flurry of eight disappearances from 1987 to 1990, there was a ten-year pause, but they restarted in 2000, in Charleville-Mézières again, then another in Sedan in 2001, and one more in Guermantes in 2003.

Of the places where the women went missing, only two appeared on the list more than once: Auxerre (three women) and Charleville-Mézières (two). When plotted on a map, the locations are spread across a vast area of 21,500 square miles.

It is easy to see, therefore, why authorities struggled to connect them to the culprit: dreaded serial killer Michel Fourniret, known as ‘the Beast of Ardennes’.

Finally arrested in 2003 in Belgium, Fourniret was convicted to life in prison in 2008 for the murder and rape or attempted rape of seven teenagers and young women, after he admitted to killing several women and girls.

Fourniret would go on to be convicted again after confessing to more killings, and he confessed to three more he was never convicted of – including 20-year-old British tutor Joanna Parrish, who was killed in Auxerre in 1990.

But of all of Fourniret’s horrific killings, one stood out in particular: That of nine-year-old Estelle, who went missing in 2003. The whereabouts of her body remain a mystery to this day, and is a secret that Fourniret took to his grave.

The youngest of Fourniret’s victims, Estelle’s disappearance has been likened to that of Madeleine McCann‘s, the three-year-old British girl who went missing in 2007.

As with McCann, who vanished in Portugal, Estelle disappeared without a trace, leaving investigators stumped while capturing the attention of the public and media.

The girl had been returning from school on January 9, 2003 in the commune of Guermantes, some 15 miles east from the centre of Paris.

The nine-year-old was last seen that winter’s day in front of a bakery, en route to the house belonging to her mother, Suzanne Mouzin.

Suzanne, who was in the middle of a divorce from Estelle’s father Eric, raised the alarm with the local police station at around 7pm that evening.

Little did she know, in going to the police she had lit the touch paper on an investigation that would span seventeen years, spark huge media coverage in France, and yet would never truly discover what had happened to her little girl.

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Tortured and raped in a soundproof dungeon as they were slowly starved to death: How killer paedophile Marc Dutroux abused children as young as eight with the aid of his wife in ‘house of horror’

Last year, authorities in Belgium ordered a modest red brick house in the south-west city of Charleroi to be torn down.

For anyone not in-the-know, the destruction of the property – which sat on a street corner yards away from a railway track and a busy flyover – would have seemed wholly unremarkable. Just another old building making way for something new.

But the move had been in the making for more than a quarter of a century, and even to this day, the local community in Charleroi and those affected by the events that unfolded there in the mid-90s are continuing to process their grief.

As of Tuesday, as part of these efforts, anyone passing the site will find a newly-opened memorial: a tree-filled garden surrounded by white walls that are decorated with a mural of a child watching a kite soar into the sky.

Underneath the memorial lies something more sinister: a soundproofed dungeon that was once used to imprison young girls who were tortured and raped by the former owner of the house and Belgium’s most notorious criminal, Marc Dutroux.

The memorial is a homage to Dutroux’s victims, and at the request of their parents, the basement will remain preserved underneath for potential future investigations that some believe could uncover a wider criminal network.

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Belgian drug seizures overload incinerators

Customs agents in Belgium have seized more cocaine than they are able to dispose of in a timely manner, officials told local outlet VRT News on Saturday. It is estimated that more than 100 tons of the drug – valued at about €5 billion – will have been intercepted at the Port of Antwerp this year. This comes after a record-setting 90 tons were seized in 2021. 

“There has been something of a bottleneck as there have been so many seizures and also because just one incinerator was in use,” Federal Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne told the outlet. “Moreover, you cannot burn these batches in bulk, in one go, in large quantities as this would cause issues with the filters at the incineration plant.” Only 1,000kg or at most 1,500kg of the drug can be destroyed in a single session, he said. 

A representative of FPS Finance, the parent agency of Belgium’s customs service, agreed. “The rapid destruction of confiscated goods is an ongoing challenge,” spokesperson Francis Adyns told local outlet Gazet van Antwerpen. “Due to the technical limitation of the licensed incinerators and environmental standards, we have to use several incinerators.” 

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