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You’d be forgiven for thinking this was a scene from an uprising.
But you’d be wrong. This was the culmination of a casual Friday evening stroll through the Bois de la Cambre park in the heart of Brussels, the home of EU institutions.
A day after the infamous April Fools protests, a fake festival-turned-protest over COVID-19 lockdown measures, the Belgian police were out in force to show they were nobody’s fool.
Hundreds of officers assembled to pre-empt the actions of what a spokesperson for Brussels Mayor Philippe Close said was a protesting crowd of “around 100” people, in which passersby (the authors included) found themselves inadvertently caught up.
Belgium
09:36 23/02/2021
A dozen police officers from the Brussels-Capital Ixelles zone have reported misconduct by colleagues in relation to the arrests made following a prohibited demonstration in January. Their testimonies led to a letter from police union ACOD being sent to Brussels mayor Philippe Close.
According to the officers, minors were brutally beaten in the cells, while innocent by-standers caught up in the demonstration and other young people were held for hours without charge after being detained in the city centre.
In the letter to Brussels mayor Philippe Close, the president of ACOD-Brussels wrote that several mistakes were made in the demonstration against class justice last month, during which 245 people were arrested, including 91 minors. The letter dates from 15 February and deals with the facts of three weeks before that.
Belgium
10:03 25/01/2021
A demonstration by about 100 people on the Mont des Arts on Sunday went ahead without the permission of the Brussels authorities, with the police eventually moving in and making arrests.
The demonstrators, protesting against perceived injustice in recent cases of alleged police brutality and the deaths of local youths in custody, gathered at the site at around 14.00 on Sunday afternoon after answering a call to gather on Facebook, posted Friday evening.
At the time of the posting, permission had been granted for the demonstration to take place but was later revoked after pressure from interior minister Annelies Verlinden forced Brussels Mayor Philippe Close to do so, on the grounds that the protest’s organiser could not guarantee that no more than 100 protesters would attend.
Belgium
10:03 25/01/2021
A demonstration by about 100 people on the Mont des Arts on Sunday went ahead without the permission of the Brussels authorities, with the police eventually moving in and making arrests.
The demonstrators, protesting against perceived injustice in recent cases of alleged police brutality and the deaths of local youths in custody, gathered at the site at around 14.00 on Sunday afternoon after answering a call to gather on Facebook, posted Friday evening.
At the time of the posting, permission had been granted for the demonstration to take place but was later revoked after pressure from interior minister Annelies Verlinden forced Brussels Mayor Philippe Close to do so, on the grounds that the protest’s organiser could not guarantee that no more than 100 protesters would attend.