Crime against humanity: Why has a court found Belgium guilty of kidnapping?

Thousands of children were forcibly taken from their families in Belgium’s African colonies because they were mixed-race.

A court has ordered Belgium to pay millions of dollars in compensation to five mixed-race women who were forcibly taken from their homes in the Belgian Congo as children, under a colonial-era practice that judges said was a “crime against humanity”.

The landmark ruling on Monday by the Brussels Court of Appeal came after years of legal battle by the aggrieved women. It sets a historic precedent for state-sanctioned abductions that saw thousands of children kidnapped from today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo because of their racial makeup.

An earlier ruling from a lower court in 2021 rejected the women’s claims.

However, the Appeals court on Monday ordered the Belgian state to “compensate the appellants for the moral damage resulting from the loss of their connection to their mothers and the damage to their identity and their connection to their original environment”.  The five women will receive 250,000 euros ($267,000) combined.

Monique Bitu Bingi (71), one of the women who brought the case in 2020, told Al Jazeera she was satisfied with the ruling.