A Brussels criminal court heard arguments on Thursday on how Belgium’s new penal code should apply to sentencing 18 defendants in an international cocaine trafficking case.
The trial had been nearly completed under the previous legal framework, but the court reopened proceedings on Monday and asked all parties to reassess their positions in light of the new code and the sentencing levels now in force.
The prosecutor kept her original sentencing requests unchanged, seeking prison terms ranging from 18 months to 14 years.
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She requested the heaviest sentences, 12 and 14 years, for the alleged leaders of the criminal organisation, including A.B. and G.W., known as “Breda” and “the Belgian Bald Man”.
According to the prosecution, the group imported cocaine from Central and South America using fruit containers. Five tonnes of cocaine were seized in the Netherlands and at the port of Antwerp in 2024.
The prosecutor said the old penal code was more favourable for most of the 18 defendants and urged the court to apply it in all but one case.
For that defendant, she had requested a four-year prison sentence, while the new code sets a level 2 penalty of one to three years for the alleged offences.
She added, however, that the new penal code could prove more favourable to the defendants if the court were to accept mitigating circumstances for each of them.
On that basis, she suggested the court could instead start from level 5 penalties under the new code, which carry prison terms of 15 to 20 years, and then reduce the sentence level and length by taking mitigating circumstances into account.
She noted that level 5 is the category set by the new penal code for drug trafficking offences and for leading a criminal organisation.
During what was described as a largely technical closing submission, lawyers for the 18 defendants took note of the prosecutor’s reasoning but were left puzzled, as mitigating circumstances had not been debated during the trial because they were excluded by the mechanism of correctionalisation.
The defence is due to present its arguments, and its interpretation of the new code, on 21 September at 14:00.
