2023-08-10 06:06:00
“We want to dissuade them by punishing them very severely here,” said one in the cabinet of Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne.
The number of Dutch nationals in a Belgian cell has almost doubled since 2018. This is partly due to the cracking of Sky ECC, the encrypted messaging service often used by drug criminals.
Moreover, Dutch people are only rarely transferred to their country of origin to serve their prison sentence there. This year, this has so far only concerned 13 convicts. Last year, there were 19. This is explained by the fact that there are Belgian victims, but also by the fact that the penal policy with regard to drug criminals is much more lax there.
A striking figure: 37% of detainees are in preventive detention
“It is not so easy to transfer people”, adds the office of the Minister of Justice. “The Netherlands, Belgium and the prisoner must agree. It is not desirable for our country if criminals in the Netherlands receive a lighter sentence, because we want to deter them by punishing them very severely here .”
Thus, those who extract cocaine in the port of Antwerp, for example, risk a prison sentence of three to five years in Belgium. In the Netherlands last year, similar outlaw profiles were sentenced to terms ranging from three to about five months in prison.
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