Author: fredalanmedforth

Angered by government plans to cut their pensions, Belgian magistrates will send 4,000 people who received short jail sentences to prison.

Their reaction went against a request by Belgium’s Justice Minister, who had asked not to send people with short sentences to jail because they were overcrowded.

Belgian prisons currently hold around 11,000 inmates despite having a capacity for only 9,000. Rather than expanding prison infrastructure, the government has opted to ease overcrowding by releasing individuals serving short sentences or not sending them to jail to begin with.

Most recently, the current government announced an emergency measure granting early release to undocumented migrants to create more room.

On top of sending 4,000 people to the already overcrowded prison system, the angry magistrates will no longer reply to parliamentary questions or advise the government or parliament.

Frédéric Van Leeuw, the Attorney General of Brussels, speaking on behalf of the College of Public Prosecutors, said their actions come because “the government has simply gone too far. At a certain point, the bucket overflows.”

He told on radio show De Ochtend that the government reforms did not alleviate the already high workload and instead introduced cuts in their pensions, even of some magistrates who were already on retirement, without any consultation with the sector.

Van Leeuw said that the government policies were “disproportional”.

He added that the magistrates only decided to send the 4,000 people to the prisons, but that it was up to the prison directors, who fall under the Minister of Justice, to decide if they would take them in.

Van Leeuw said people should not compare the wages and pensions of magistrates to those of people in the private sector, stressing the need for them to be independent.

He said that most magistrates in Belgium received the maximum pension, more than €8,000 gross per month, the highest possible, but that 30 per cent of it was under threat of being taken away.

This would make jobs in the magistrate unattractive in the future, he claimed.

He said most magistrates had many qualifications and were highly capable people. He said there was a consensus about their pensions being deferred salary.

In the end, he warned, lowering their pensions would threaten their independence. Making the comparison with politicians, he pointed out that people who know they won’t receive a high pension would start to look for other opportunities.

“If magistrates start to do that [look for cushy end-of-career jobs like politicians], it would be a big problem.”

They would go to companies to get a decent pension, just like what many former European Commissioners did, leading to cooling-off period rules, preventing them from paid lobbying or advocacy, for a specified period to avoid conflicts of interest and guarantee their independence.

For magistrates not to fall into the same trap, Van Leeuw argued, they should be able to keep their standard of living intact.

Kathleen Van De Vijver, spokesperson of the prison system, was displeased with the magistrates’ actions, having not been informed in advance and instead learning about the decision through the media.

She said the magistrates’ decision endangered their workers and society as a whole, calling it “totally incomprehensible”.

In Belgium, an employee receives an average pension of €1,634 per month and a self-employed person €1,197.

Magistrates weren’t the only ones taking action in Belgium. The railways have been affected by a wave of strikes in response to reforms and pension changes, including plans to phase out their privileged early retirement scheme, which allowed some workers to retire as early as 55.

https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/04/belgian-judges-protest-by-sending-4000-criminals-to-jail/

French writer Renaud Camus has been informed that his presence in the United Kingdom “is not considered to be conducive to the public good,” and thus he has been banned from entering the country.

The British government has finally found someone they will stop crossing the English Channel, and ironically enough, it’s an openly gay, anti-mass migration thinker who was coming to give a speech at a political event. Prolific author and philosopher Renaud Camus has revealed that his application for an Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) to visit the United Kingdom has been declined, and he is consequently banned from entering Britain.

He revealed an email he received from the British Home Office stating: “Your presence in the UK is not considered conducive to the public good.”

Camus said he had been scheduled to address a meeting of the Homeland Party, a legally registered, albeit minor, UK political party with a strong focus on deporting migrants, and then to address the Oxford Union—a world-renowned forum for debate—just a few weeks later.

Camus’s publisher, Vauban Books, issued a statement on the decision, saying that the United Kingdom’s ban on the 78-year-old writer is “only further confirmation that that country has abandoned the most basic principles of liberal democracy.”

They continued: “Camus is one of our greatest living writers and will be remembered as such by posterity. The Starmer government, by contrast, will be remembered – if it’s remembered at all – only for its serial betrayals and profound mediocrity. Here as elsewhere, it has inadvertently shown just how precious Camus’ voice is, now more than ever”.

Camus’s own comments on the decision conformed with his usual style of acerbic wit. He wrote: “Apparently they are afraid that I might [genocide] the British people. Yet I am 78, and gay… I love England. Or at least I used to, before colonization.”

Reflecting on the joint problems impacting the United Kingdom and his native France, Camus wrote on Friday that the media class found itself stumped by “complex mysteries” such as why there is a “meteoric rise in drug trafficking and the violence associated with it in small towns that were once quite peaceful… dizzying rise in rape and other violence against women… staggering rise in administrative corruption”, etcetera.

To most, Camus is best known for having coined the term ‘the Great Replacement’, which, despite constant accusations of being a hard-right conspiracy theory, has entered the political language of several countries, not least in France, where a recent national survey found fully half the country believed it to be true. Of the replacement of European peoples, he has written:

In 15 centuries, there has not been a single episode, dramatic though some may have been, neither the Hundred Years War nor the German occupation, that has represented a threat as serious, deadly and virtually definitive in its consequences for our homeland as the change of people.

Camus spoke to Breitbart News in 2018 and expressed the prevailing view of the “Davocracy” globalist elites, that human beings are generally interchangeable: “A product, a producer, and a consumer all at once, a thing, a number, not a human being”. From such a point of view, no sentimentality or worth can be attributed to any group of people, as they can be freely exchanged for another and still perform the same role.

The elites support the “Great Replacement,” therefore, which he defined as “the change of people and civilisation for the sake of the industry of man, the economic system which produces the Undifferentiated Human Matter, the human Nutella, spreadable at will.”

This week’s ban on Camus visiting the United Kingdom, even to address Oxford University, comes as the British government continues to struggle to confront the apparently intractable border crisis. A new record for boat migrant arrivals was recorded this week, with 705 illegals landing on Britain’s beaches on Tuesday, taking the total for the year — per the BBC — to 8,888, a massive leap on arrivals to this point in the previous year.

More broadly, immigration to the United Kingdom is at levels never seen in British history, quite possibly ever. Net arrivals hit another record high in 2023, and gross arrivals hit an estimated 1.2 million new residents in the country by July 2024. Brexit leader Nigel Farage described the figures as “horrendous” and warned that the rapid change risked producing “very disjointed societies and communities.”

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2025/04/19/uk-bans-french-great-replacement-philosopher-renaud-camus-from-entering-country

Terrorists and paedophiles are able to choose from 51 gender identities in a Home Office database that tracks Britains most dangerous offenders.

Police leaders have acknowledged that “no formal risk assessment” was conducted before allowing extremists and sex offenders to be registered as “androgyne” or “pangender”.

The extensive list of niche gender options has been condemned as “madness”, and the Home Secretary has been urged to take action amid warnings that failing to accurately record a criminal’s biological sex could endanger public safety.

This follows a landmark Supreme Court ruling on Wednesday that “the concept of sex is binary” and the words “woman” and “man” refer to biological sex.

Authorities will now be expected to record the biological sex of criminals, rather than their preferred gender identity.

Speaking on Friday evening, Robert Jenrick, the Shadow Justice Secretary said this proved police were “more interested in woke nonsense than arresting criminals”.

He told The Daily Mail: “Gender identity is irrelevant to a system that’s sole focus should be on protecting the public and tracking dangerous people. This is a recipe for operational failure.”

The Home Office has acknowledged that the offender tracking database – updated in 2022 to include a “gender identity” field – is now considered “outdated” and confirmed that a new system is currently in development.

Among the gender identity options listed are terms such as “pangender”, “transgender person”, “androgyne”, and “neutrois”.

Several gender categories listed in the system are essentially duplicates – like “cis male” and “cis man” – due to offenders providing varying responses or inconsistencies in how officials recorded their identities.

These classifications appear in the Violent and Sex Offender Register (ViSOR), a Home Office-run database used to monitor the UK’s most high-risk individuals after their release from prison.

According to the Ministry of Justice, ViSOR is used by police, prison services, and probation officers to “manage the risks posed by individuals convicted of serious violent, sexual, and terrorism offences living in the community in order to protect the public.”

Maya Forstater of the charity Sex Matters, said allowing offenders to be recorded as ridiculous genders wasted police time and taxpayers’ money and “makes a mockery of the justice system”.

She added: “There is no justification for this foolishness,. Police forces should focus on solving crime and keeping the public safe.”

Despite widespread criticism following the Isla Bryson case, some police forces continue to record rapists as female if that is how they identify.

Bryson, who began identifying as transgender while awaiting trial for two rapes, was convicted in 2023 and sentenced to eight years in prison. Initially placed in a women’s prison, Bryson was later moved to a men’s facility after public backlash.

The list of gender identity options in the ViSOR database reveals 20 different “trans” categories available to offenders.

Those listed in the system can also self-identify as “gender fluid” – meaning their gender may shift based on how they feel – as well as “genderqueer” or simply “other”.

The term “androgyne” refers to someone who is both male and female, or exists somewhere in between, while “neutrois” is associated with gender neutrality or the absence of gender altogether.

According to separate Ministry of Justice figures, three individuals convicted of terrorism offences were recorded on ViSOR in 2023 as either “gender fluid” or “non-binary” – rather than male or female.

The ViSOR database is used across the UK by police in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, as well as by the Probation Service and HM Prison Service.

Annual figures by the Ministry of Justice show that the database conflates biological sex and gender identity in their official data.

A Home Office spokesman said: “The ViSOR system was developed twenty-five years ago, in an effort to maximise the information collected and shared about known offenders and thereby help the police keep track of them.

https://www.gbnews.com/news/gender-row-britain-dangerous-offenders-home-office-trans-genders

On today’s #NCFNewspeak, Senior Fellows Rafe Heydel-Mankoo and Dr. Philip Kiszely and Amy Gallagher of Stand up to Woke discuss the Supreme Court’s historic ruling as well as Lord Toby Young’s efforts to amend Labour’s anti-free speech bill.

According to Le Point, 52-year-old E. H., who was born in Nouakchott (Mauritania) and has a degree (DEA) in computer science, worked as a service provider for the Ministry of Justice between 2016 and 2019, where he was highly commended for his technical skills. He claimed to be an expert in performance auditing and had been working from Brussels for a multinational company since 2019.

However, this man is now affected by an order to freeze his assets because he headed an association that was disbanded by the authorities in the context of the fight against radical Islamism. His professional past within the Ministry of Justice itself raises serious questions about the internal control and monitoring mechanisms.

Le Point,Un islamiste radical mauritanien fiché a travaillé comme consultant pour le ministère de la Justice – Fdesouche

Another crime against Christianity. A police source told Valeurs actuelles that on Thursday evening, April 17, a statue of the Virgin Mary was found torn from the ground and broken into several pieces. The crime took place in the Rue de la Bauduère in Les Sables-d’Olonne in the Vendée.

The location is said not to be secured by video surveillance. It is therefore likely to be difficult to track down the perpetrator(s). (…)

Le JDD

Faced with this act, the mayor Yannick Moreau promises: ‘We will make amends for this outrage against the local heritage by restoring the site as it was before this deliberate act of cruelty’, because ‘the town and the inhabitants of Sablais are the owners of these places, which are embedded in their daily life’.

Actu.fr / Les Sables-d’Olonne (85) – acte anti-chrétien en cette Semaine sainte : un autel dégradé et une statue de la Vierge Marie brisée – Fdesouche

Our Senior Fellow Rafe Heydel-Mankoo joined Martin Daubney on GB News to lay out a few of his policies for stopping the boats.

Two siblings in their 80s, one 82 and the other 84, were violently beaten by a man who was attempting to rob the two of jewelry and money. During the robbery, he told them he was robbing them out of revenge for what France did to Africa.

On the night of April 6 going into April 7, a man broke into the siblings’ home. When the two noticed his presence, he told them he was a member of the “African police,” according to a police source speaking with JDD.

The two, due to their advanced age, were unable to defend themselves. They were taken into a room and tied up with cable ties. Both their heads were then covered with pillow cases.

When the two siblings protested, he delivered a number of statements as to why he was robbing them, including: “Frace stole Africa’s gold, now it’s our turn.”

When questioned by the police, the two elderly victims said they saw the Black man search their apartment from top to bottom and spray-cleaning everything that he touched, presumably in an attempt to remove DNA or other evidence.

The man stole several watches, jewelry, and bank cards of the victims after obtaining their PIN numbers by threatening them.

The man is described as “African-looking” and 25. Police are still searching for him. He was wearing a bucket hat and a black Nike sweatshirt.

Elderly victims have long been a target for attack in France. Last year, Remix News reported that a Moroccan illegal migrant was sentenced to 15 years in prison for two cases dating to 2020, when he burst into the room of a 62-year-old woman and raped her, and then months later, reportedly beat another woman, 86, in a brutal attack.

Last year, an African migrant brutally beat and robbed 17 different elderly women in a string of attacks in the city of Rennes. Labeled a serial attacker of the elderly, the 36-year-old man used extreme violence on his targets, including women over the age of 90.

Also last year, another African migrant beat and robbed ten elderly women in Paris. In court, he said he “regretted his actions.” Many of the women were targeted right as they entered their homes, with the man pushing them inside and proceeding to assault and rob them.

In addition, last year, an African migrant broke into a 75-year-old woman’s house on New Year’s morning and violently raped her in Ozoir-la-Ferrière.

https://rmx.news/article/france-stole-africas-gold-now-its-our-turn-a-burglar-kidnaps-and-beats-two-80-year-old-siblings-in-paris/

State media outlets in Belgium have expressed concern that reporting on the serious health condition of a Vlaams Belang politician may contribute to the “humanisation of the far-right”.

In early April, Guy D’haeseleer, the Mayor of Ninove in the Flemish province of East Flanders and a prominent figure within Vlaams Belang, was hospitalised with acute liver failure caused by hepatitis.

Since then, he has remained in intensive care and urgently requires a liver transplant. A compatible donor has yet to be found.

Due to the critical nature of his condition, combined with his political profile, updates on his health and how his family has been coping have featured heavily in the news.

Like many countries, Belgium has faced a severe shortage of donor livers and long waiting lists.

Regarding D’haeseleer, though, some journalists within State media have started to question the extensive coverage of his condition.

They have argued that such reporting risked fostering public sympathy for D’haeseleer and, by extension, the Vlaams Belang party, which the Left has labelled “far-right”.

“Not a day goes by without the Flemish media mentioning the state of health of the far-right Mayor,” Francophone news channel RTBF stated.

“Between the humanisation of the far-right and information to the public, where should the limit be drawn?”

The journalists concerned were inspired by an April 14 piece on VRT NWS, the Dutch-speaking State broadcaster, where the News Ombudsman at the station, Judit Verstraete, spoke about the question of the perceived excessive focus on D’haeseleer’s health.

“One may well ask whether that [media attention] is necessary. Surely some restraint seems appropriate here now,” she said.

“It remains a very personal situation. Just because the information is available does not mean it has to be brought out. The editors should therefore consider with every update whether it transcends the personal situation sufficiently to report on it.”

On RTBF, it was noted that many in the media broadly reported on the case under headlines including My family even came to say goodbye, Human solidarity overcomes political differences and The difficult quest for a donor of faith: ‘We lack organs’.

Laura Jacobs, a political scientist from the University of Antwerp specialising in the “far right”, said: “It might seem surprising at first glance” that a Vlaams Belang politician received so much attention.

She added that he was already known to the broader public before his illness, due to his political success in Ninove, where he gained an absolute majority. Jacobs also said Flemish media tended to “personalise” its reporting about “famous” people.

In October, she had written that the media should not approach D’haeseleer on a personal level but “be critical, use fact-checks and substantive rebuttals”.

A spokesperson for Vlaams Belang told Brussels Signal on April 18: “What on earth are the Francophone media focusing on, while this man is fighting for his life in hospital? This is nothing short of disgraceful.”

Despite being the second-biggest party in the country, Vlaams Belang has been placed behind a cordon sanitaire at the national level, meaning all other parties have refused to work with it.

In the media, the party has only been allowed to appear on current affairs programmes — and thus is severely underrepresented in the broadcast media compared to its voter share.

Vlaams Belang media treatment in Flanders has improved in recent times compared to the past, when all coverage was uniquely negative. In Wallonia, though, this negative trend has continued and exclusion remains the norm.

RTBF has not limited its approach to Belgian politicians only. In January, it famously refused to broadcast the inauguration speech of US President Donald Trump live, having claimed he spread a “racist, far-right, xenophobic” message.

The station decided to broadcast his speech slightly later than live, apparently to allow time for analysis to be undertaken.

Belgian State media ‘fears humanising critically ill Vlaams Belang politician’

Climate activists from the left-wing group ‘Restore Wetlands,’ known for resorting to criminal acts to advance their agenda, forced their way past protective barriers on Wednesday and climbed aboard the Vasa—the world’s only surviving intact 17th-century ship—housed inside the museum that bears its name.

According to Expressen, the activists tied themselves to the mast, unfurled a banner reading “Stop Peat Mining,” and shouted slogans before being removed by police. Their organization—which, in its manifesto, declares that “playing along” with parliamentary democracy is “purely destructive”—was proudly and unapologetically promoting the stunt on its website.

The Vasa, a warship built for King Gustav II Adolf, sank just minutes into its maiden voyage outside Stockholm in August 1628, killing all but 30 of its crew. It was rediscovered in 1956 by an amateur archaeologist, with salvage operations beginning in 1959 and continuing until 1961. The museum that now houses the ship was inaugurated in 1988, and the Vasa is widely regarded as a vital part of Sweden’s cultural heritage.

Lars Amréus, Director General of the Swedish National Maritime and Transport Museums—of which the Vasa Museum is a part—said in a press release:

We strongly condemn this type of action, which endangers both personal safety and our shared cultural heritage. Such actions have no place in museums or the cultural sector at large. Our main focus is to ensure that Vasa has not been damaged.

Amréus emphasized the ship’s fragility: “Ninety-eight to ninety-nine percent of the ship is original, so they have undoubtedly moved on original parts of the ship,” which could have caused harm to the vessel.

He noted that while climate activists have, in other incidents, damaged artifacts with paint or glue, there is currently no indication that this kind of vandalism occurred in this case.

As of now, no significant harm to the historic ship has been identified, though further inspections will be conducted, according to the museum. Still, putting the best-preserved 17th-century ship at risk “reveals the activists’ fanaticism,” columnist Linda Jerneck wrote: “Restore Wetlands wants us to show solidarity with future generations—by pissing on what previous generations left behind.”

https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/eco-activists-target-17th-century-warship-in-climate-stunt/