Up to 525 prisoners in Belgian prisons are forced to sleep on the floor due to a lack of beds, according to data collected by local media. Last week, the country’s head of the prison service, Mathilde Steenburgen, declared that the current situation is as follows: “It’s a humanitarian crisis for prisoners.”
The situation is worsening in the country, which has received repeated warnings from the Council of Europe over overcrowding in its prisons. In this sense, I would add The number of inmates without beds increased by 36 from the previous week. According to data provided by the Prison Service and collected by the VRT network.
In a statement carried by Flemish media, Steenburgen said the overcrowding was “a humanitarian crisis for prisoners and a state of emergency for staff.” ”As overcrowding worsens, the effects will extend beyond prisons. In society. People trapped in such conditions can only get out of prison in worse conditions, and we are already witnessing it carefully today. There will be more recidivism,” he explained.
Faced with this situation, the prison requested the Ministry of Justice to take the following measures: emergency measures to resolve the issue; This is explained by the aforementioned media. All this after the coalition government led by Flemish nationalist Bart de Weber signed a deal in April this year giving the Ministry of Justice an additional 150 million euros in 2025 to address prison saturation, staffing shortages and other reforms.
At the time, Belgian conservative Minister of Justice Anneliese Verlinden (CD&V) raised the following: Prisoners could be sent to renovated prisons in Kosovo from 2027 as a possible way to alleviate ‘overcrowding’. Indeed, the European Commission’s new proposals for European regulations on repatriation plan to allow European Union member states to send returned migrants to third countries.
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