Brussels Court of Appeal, Kingdom of Belgium v E. M., Nr. 2020 KR 3, 5 March 2020
This case concerns a Belgian woman who had travelled to Syria to join her partner and claimed to have given birth to a son there. Held in the camp of Al-Hol, operated by the Kurdish authorities, she sued the Belgian State to repatriate her son and herself from Syria. The Court of Appeal of Brussels ruled that the guidelines issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs providing for the repatriation of all Belgian children up to ten years old from Syrian territory created a subjective right prone to judicial review. Further, having regard to Article 22bis(4) of the Belgian Constitution as well as Article 3(1) of the Convention of the Rights of the Child, the government’s discretionary power to exercise the right to consular assistance was limited by the child’s best interests. Having regard to the fact that the Kurdish authorities controlled the Al-Hol camp and could determine the modalities for repatriation, the Court found that Belgium did not exercise extraterritorial jurisdiction in the sense of the ECHR or the ICCPR. Nor did the human right to enter one’s own country entail a positive obligation on the part of the State to ensure repatriation.
L. DE BRUCKER, “Het recht op consulaire bijstand vanuit nationaal-, Europees- en internationaalrechtelijk perspectief. Naar een subjectief recht op repatriëring voor kinderen van Syriëstrijders?”, Tijdschrift voor Jeugd- en Kinderrechten 2020, 194-210.