Douglas De Coninck is a journalist.
Last Friday afternoon. A Reuzegom lawyer is sitting on a terrace on the Waalse Kaai, enjoying the sun and a cup of coffee. He beckons you and asks: “Don’t you think this is disgusting? Come onfor that family.”
The social unease after the judgment that allowed 18 members of student club Reuzegom to get away with community service and fines that are even lower than when their illustrious predecessors forced their shafts to kill a pig in 2009 is immense. For the record: The morning is a newspaper made by people who prefer to see as few people in prison as possible. Apart from the Public Prosecution Service, no one of the 18 Giant Gommers has ever wished handcuffs or door spies, not even Sanda Dia’s relatives.
If this judgment generates incomprehension to such an extent that even one of those ‘expensive lawyers’ himself no longer understands it, then that is completely independent of the sentence. It has to do with certain passages in that judgment. Like this one: “The message posted by the defendant JS at 12:08 a.m. in which he states that ‘S. is ripe for the rubbish bin’ is not considered relevant by the court.”
Or this one: “The fish test, in which a live goldfish has to be swallowed and then regurgitated by taking fish oil, as well as the test with the blended mouse, involved traditional and fixed baptism rituals known to all members of the Reuzegom student club.”
Shouldn’t the blended mouse gradually be included in the Flemish canon? Because then there was also this 18-fold consideration: “The negative reporting via the (social) media and its impact on the defendant and his environment, as well as the passage of time since the facts.”
It is the lawyers of the 18 themselves who have stretched the procedure endlessly. The first investigating judge in Turnhout was removed from the case because the mother of one of the 18 had been appointed to the Antwerp court of first instance, just like her. And replaced by a much less diligent investigating judge. When lawyer Elisa Van Bocxlaer asked her in 2019 to add a list of former members of Reuzegom to the file, it was immediately not. The lawyer, at the time in this newspaper: “As soon as the file was in Hasselt, we received a negative answer to all our questions. While you would think that everyone would want a fair trial? How can we, so to speak, verify that the person who must judge at the end has not himself ever been baptized at Reuzegom?”
So that’s the predominant feeling. That something inappropriate happened somewhere in the process leading up to this arrest.
In the 1980s and 1990s this sometimes happened. We then had politicians who set up a parliamentary committee of inquiry to scrutinize the entire course of the procedure. If at the end it turns out that people in Flanders have lost their confidence in the judiciary en masse because everyone suddenly saw ghosts, it can do no harm if the legislature brings clarity. Parliament has that right.
