Surprising proposal in Flanders: the NVA wants to send undocumented detainees to this country!

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A few weeks before the elections, political parties are coming up with their little proposals to pamper their electorate. Latest development: the N-VA is proposing to build a prison… in Kosovo to accommodate undocumented immigrants incarcerated in Belgium. During a recent organized trip to the Balkans, Theo Francken wanted to follow in the footsteps of Denmark, which plans to rent a prison in Kosovo for 10 years to accommodate 300 detainees who reside illegally in the country.

The proposal appears in the electoral program of the N-VA, which sees it as a solution to prison overcrowding. Behind this proposal, the objective of the N-VA is to make people residing illegally understand that they are not welcome in Belgium, as Kosovo is not part of the European Union.

An-Sofie Vanhouche, professor of criminology at the VUB, dampens the hopes of our colleagues at the VRT. “In Denmark, the idea is not yet entirely relevant. The prison itself has already been built but a lot of elements still need to be sorted out and a lot of things remain unclear,” she explains. “It is quite easy to build a building, but not to transfer people to Kosovo. The detainees refuse to be transferred to another country. And it is not because they have been convicted that they do not retain their rights”.

Several inmates injured during a fight at Antwerp prison, police requested for reinforcement

And this is where the problem lies, because the quality of prisons must be equal to that of Denmark, and therefore of Belgium. “Can human rights continue to be guaranteed in Kosovo’s prisons? This is the first problem for Denmark. Many legal experts believe this is not feasible,” she adds.

For Nicolas Cohen, member of the Belgian branch of the international prison observatory, this proposal resembles “prison xenophobia”. “This exit from the N-VA is off the mark, it makes no sense. The purpose of serving the prison sentence is to prepare for reintegration but if, at the end of the sentence, this should result in expulsion from the territory, this must be managed from Belgium in a humane and intelligent manner. This looks like populism and xenophobia to please their electorate a few months before the elections. This was already done in the past in a prison in Tilburg in the Netherlands but it was stopped,” he concludes.