Police cleared an occupied building at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) at 06:30 on Saturday.
Speaking to several French-speaking Belgian media, ULB Rector Annemie Schaus condemned severe vandalism and explicit calls to violence inside building P1 on the Solbosch campus.
She obtained an emergency judge's warrant from the Brussels Court of First Instance after activists ignored a Thursday evening deadline to leave, and by Saturday at dawn, officers dismantled the barricades.
On 22 October, a group calling itself Occupation autonome ULB seized the language facility for 16 days.
Several dozen ULB students, secondary school pupils, art students, and alleged external far-left militants joined the blockade. Collectively, they renamed the premises after Aïcha Aboubaïa – a Gazan student stranded at the border alongside 12 peers after Belgian authorities refused their visas.
Hate speech and vandalism
Activists initially targeted tuition fee hikes, student poverty, and global crises: Palestine, climate change, artificial intelligence, and university funding. They later submitted a catch-all list of demands on the eve of an Academic Council meeting with ULB, which has since fulfilled half of those requests.
After mediation attempts collapsed, most demonstrators vacated the premises on Thursday, and only 15 to 30 hardliners remained inside. Defiant organisers subsequently called for a protest rally on social media following Saturday's police raid.
Schaus said the holdouts crossed a legal line by breaking into private offices, obstructing classes, and spray-painting hateful graffiti targeting the police, the state, Israel, and the university. "Everything prohibited by law is prohibited at ULB," she stressed, condemning the "racist and violent slogans".
Blocking building P1 halted 125 weekly language classes designed primarily for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Ironically, the standoff unfolded just as the rector opened a campus anti-racism festival featuring Molenbeek youths from the "Je suis la Belgique" movement, who marched to Bruges after hooligan violence.
Outsiders turning a university building into a closed-door enclave betrayed the open debate principles ULB has defended since 1834, the rector argued. Despite suspecting that the radicals wanted to provoke an authoritarian backlash, she vowed to maintain dialogue across the university's democratic bodies.
While administrators have not yet decided on legal prosecution, the rector refuses to use strained university funds for building repairs. "I believe that responsibility lies with the occupants," Schaus said. ULB currently enrols 39,000 students.
