Report on Belgium

Warning: On 16 January 2015, following a police intervention in Verviers and in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, the Belgian government announced a series of measures against radicalization and terrorism. They are said to include the extension of terrorist offences, the extension of the use of special investigation techniques, the enlargement of the possibility to withdraw Belgian nationality and to withdraw temporarily the identity cards and passports, the implementation of the freezing of assets at the national level, the possibility to call on the army for specific surveillance missions and the strengthening of the analysis capacities of Belgian intelligence services. INTRODUCTION A. Belgian Experience with Terrorism Until recently, the terrorist threat with which Belgium was confronted was far more limited than in other Member States (MS) of the European Union (EU), such as Italy, Spain, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. However, this does not mean that it was totally nonexistent. Like many other Western European states, during the first half of the 1980s, Belgium faced extreme left-wing domestic terrorism, especially the activities of the so-called cellules communistes combattantes (CCC). Although this group committed numerous terrorist attacks that resulted in the death of two firefighters and injury to three others, their seriousness was more limited than those performed by the German Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) or the Italian Brigate Rosse. During the late 1980s and 1990s, no significant terrorist threat was recorded. But the situation changed about ten years ago. According to intelligence and investigative authorities, the international terrorist threat, especially that related to radical Islamist terrorism, has become a major concern in Belgium. The country serves as an operating base for terrorist Jihadist groups, cells or networks; recruitment and training of terrorists have been organised from Belgium, and Belgium does not escape from the phenomenon of radicalization and homegrown terrorism. In this regard, the existence of more or less organised and structured recruitment network(s) to go to fight in Syria are worrying. Lone wolves and self-radicalisation are also included among Belgian terrorist threats. Action has been taken to face the radicalisation threat, for instance, with the adoption in 2005 of a ‘national counter-radicalism plan’ and a more recent federal programme of prevention of violent radicalisation.SCOPUS: ch.bSCOPUS: ch.b