A lack of investigators in the Brussels Court of Appeal has resulted in a skyrocketing backlog of cases.
The number of cases that cannot be investigated in the Brussels Court of Appeal, due to a lack of investigators, has risen by as much as 157% in the last five years, Brussels Public Prosecutor Johan Delmulle said in his speech on the occasion of the opening of the new judicial year.
In that speech, the magistrate invariably gives a picture of how the correctional prosecutors' offices have operated over the past year. It shows, for instance, that the inflow at the correctional public prosecutors' offices in Brussels, Walloon Brabant, Halle-Vilvoorde, and Leuven fell by 12% between 2021 and 2022. But that is a distorted picture.
"If we were to exclude the cases during the pandemic, there is an 8% increase," he said." If we compare the total inflow of 2022 with that of five years earlier, 2017, we are talking about an increase of 6 per cent in our jurisdiction."
The number of cases closed by correctional prosecutors in the jurisdiction increased by just under 11% between 2017 and 2022.
Meanwhile, the number of cases closed without criminal prosecution for technical reasons increased by 3%, and a 33% increase was recorded in the number that did not receive criminal prosecution for opportunity reasons (if the case is not prosecutable or if the public prosecutor considers it inappropriate to prosecute).
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The evolution in the number of cases that were not prosecuted due to a lack of investigative capacity was most alarming. "Those cases saw an increase from 2,839 to 7,307 cases between 2017 and 2022, which represents an increase of no less than 157% over five years."
The number of cases related to a troubling situation saw only a 1% decline between 2021 and last year. Compared to 2017, there has been a 25% increase.
