By Charlotte Van Campenhout and Tassilo Hummel
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Bailiffs on Thursday seized a freezer and coffee machine from the office of Belgium’s junior minister for migration to enforce a court ruling in a case brought by asylum seekers who were left homeless for several months, their lawyer said.
The objects will be auctioned with the proceeds going to the plaintiffs, a group of around 20 asylum seekers who lost their shelter after authorities evacuated a squat in central Brussels last year, forcing them to live on the street for three months.
The asylum seekers had requested shelters and the court ordered the state to provide those, imposing a penalty for each day they remained on the street. Their lawyers got the bailiffs to make seizures to enforce the initial ruling and gain a part of the money owed.
“The aim was to show that the rule of law still exists here”, said attorney Marie Doutrepont, who requested the move on behalf of her clients.
Newspaper De Tijd earlier reported bailiffs on Thursday morning came to the office of junior mininster Nicole de Moor and loaded the items onto a truck.
Doutrepont said her clients were part of an estimated 2,700 homeless asylum seekers in Belgium, most of them in the Brussels region. Despite their pending asylum requests, a shortage of public facilities has left them unhoused, constituting a breach of European refugee law.
While the seized goods were insufficient to cover her clients’ total penalty claims of around 3,000 euros each, the move was meant to send a message to the government to address what Doutrepont called an “untenable housing crisis”.
The minister, who had earlier publicly stated that paying penalties would not resolve the crisis, said on X that the legal proceedings or seizures “do not bring us an inch closer to sufficient shelters”.
(Reporting by Tassilo Hummel; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
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