In the judicial investigation concerning Schild & Friends, investigating judge Annemie Serlippens withdrew after the challenge to the main suspect Dries Van Langenhove, Member of Parliament for Vlaams Belang. This confirms the vice-chairman of the court of first instance in Ghent.
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The court in East Flanders conducted an investigation for more than two years into Schild & Vrienden and Dries Van Langenhove, the founder of the radical right-wing group. The investigation started as a result of a report by the VRT, which showed how the members of the group in closed chat groups shared racist, anti-Semitic and sexist images with each other.
Investigative judge Serlippens closed the judicial investigation into Van Langenhove on November 25 last year and handed it over to the public prosecutor for final claim. Van Langenhove had submitted a challenge to Serlippens through his lawyer, because the Twitter behavior of the investigating judge would show that she is biased. The defense had cited several tweets in the petition that Serlippens would have liked, says lawyer Joost Bosquet. One of these was the poem ‘Van Theo’s en Driezen’ that Stijn De Paepe made for De Morgen, in which he wrote ‘where rancid becomes normal, fascist banal’.
Serlippens had two days to decide whether to stay on as an investigating judge. If she stayed on, the Ghent court of appeal had to rule on the challenge, but the investigating judge surprisingly decided to withdraw from the case.
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