The Brussels public prosecutor’s office and Belgium’s new justice minister Paul Van Tigchelt (Flemish liberal) have proposed new measures to ensure that dossiers get a better follow-up and don’t get forgotten in a cupboard as happened with the Tunisian request to extradite terrorist suspect Abdessalem Lassoued months before last week’s Brussels attack.
Much has been said and written about the “cupboard with Abdessalem Lassoued’s forgotten dossier”. The extradition request remained untouched and allowed Lassoued to commit an outrage in which two people were killed.
“This must never be repeated,” says justice minister Paul Van Tigchelt. The key word now is “digitalisation”. A new system “Just One” will be operational by the end of the year. “It will contain a dashboard, listing all files, how many jobs are open, which ones have priority, an overview of investigations and judicial investigations, a planning tool, as well as an overview of the databases to be consulted,” Stephanie Vanthienen explains. She is the national ICT liaison magistrate of the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the woman behind this project. Alarms will also be built into the system in case a file remains untouched for too long.
“We will never be able to bring the margin of error to zero, but we can reduce it,” she concludes. “There will be more overview, more follow-up and better deadlines,” adds prosecutor Tim De Wolf.
“But what in the meantime?” because the system will not be in place for several months at the earliest. “There will be mandatory deadlines, more control. That will require a lot of administration, which will put even more pressure on the system, but it is clear that it is necessary in this case,” says De Wolf. “A permanent exercise in terms of resources is taking place. We will also strengthen international cooperation, the sector within which the number of cases has risen very strongly.”
All parties remain vague about the internal disciplinary investigation into the error that meant no response was given to the Tunisian extradition request. “We are now letting the investigation take its course and it is not for us to pronounce now. It should not have happened and we are drawing our conclusions to remedy the situation” officials say.
