The justice minister appoints a magistrate in each judicial district to monitor discrimination cases and oversee their prosecution, including those involving religion, as a criminal act. Bans on the slaughter of animals without prior stunning enacted by the Walloon and Flanders regional governments in are scheduled to take effect in , ending the long-standing authorization certified permanent slaughterhouses in those regions have had to slaughter animals without prior stunning.
The federal and regional governments stated they remained committed to their previously announced plans to encourage mosques to seek official recognition as a means of increasing government oversight. Although the federal government recommended several mosques for recognition by the regional governments, the number of recognized mosques increased by only two, to 85, during the year. Some observers, such as a sociologist at the Free University of Brussels, stated a number of mosques opted not to seek official recognition because they received sufficient foreign funding and preferred to do without government oversight.
Long-standing applications for government recognition by Buddhists and Hindus remained pending. Buddhists filed their request for recognition in , and Hindus in There were no other pending recognition requests by religious groups. Hindus did not receive any government subsidies. Saudi Arabia had signed a year lease for the building in The government said it terminated the lease because the Great Mosque was spreading Wahhabi Salafism, which the government stated played a role in spreading violent radicalism.
The government maintained its ban on wearing religious symbols in public sector jobs requiring interaction with the public. On September 18, the European Court of Human Rights ruled the government had violated the EU Convention on Human Rights by excluding a Muslim woman from a courtroom in for refusing to remove her headscarf.
Most public schools continued to ban headscarves, in accordance with government policy allowing individual schools to decide whether to impose such bans. According to media reports, at least 90 percent of Francophone community public schools and virtually all Flemish public schools maintained such bans. According to Muslim groups, city and town administrations continued to withhold or delay approval for the construction of new mosques and Islamic cultural centers. In Court-Saint-Etienne in May, city authorities granted an application for the construction of a new mosque after denying it four times during the previous several years.
The Jewish and Muslim communities remained opposed to the decisions by the Flanders and Walloon governments to ban slaughter without prior stunning. As in the previous year and unlike in years prior to , the Brussels regional government did not authorize any temporary slaughterhouse to carry out slaughter without prior stunning during Islamic holidays. In May the European Court of Justice upheld the existing Flanders law restricting the nonstun, ritual slaughter of animals by the Jewish and Muslim communities to licensed butchers.
Muslims had originally challenged the law, which prohibited temporary slaughter arrangements at times of peak demand, for example, during Islamic holidays such as Eid al-Adha, in Belgian courts in Catholic groups once again received approximately 85 percent of the total available funding for religious groups, followed by secular humanists 8 percent and Protestant groups 2.
Muslims again received approximately 2. According to a March report by Israeli online news site Ynet News , a parent in Bruges reported to the Jerusalem-based NGO International Legal Forum that a geography textbook approved by the education ministry and used throughout the country included an anti-Semitic cartoon.
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The cartoon stated that, according to Amnesty International, Israel denied Palestinians adequate access to water. It depicted an overweight Jew with payot sidelocks asleep in a bathtub overflowing with water juxtaposed with an old Palestinian woman unable to fill an empty water bucket. There were reports of violence, threats, harassment, discrimination, and hate speech against Muslims and Jews during the year.
Except for anti-Semitic incidents, which it defined as incidents against Jewish persons rather than against the practice of the Jewish religion and tracked separately, Unia reported complaints of religious discrimination or harassment in , the most recent year for which data were available, compared with complaints in Approximately 85 percent of incidents targeted Muslims.
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There were 10 incidents against Christians, five against Jewish religious practice, and three against nonbelievers. According to Unia, Unia also preliminarily reported anti-Semitic incidents in , one of the highest totals in recent years, and 80 percent more than the 56 incidents reported in The report did not cite details of any of the incidents. Jewish groups reported anti-Semitic statements and attitudes in the media and in schools during the year, including ones related to the Holocaust.
In December according to press reports, a man in Anderlecht punched a Muslim woman wearing a hijab on the street. The footage was shared on the internet, and the woman called on the authorities to find her attacker. In October a man in Marchienne-au-Pont threatened a Jewish couple and their son in front of their home with a gun, saying he would shoot the woman in the head.
The man had reportedly threatened the woman the week prior before the incident. In July the same woman stated that she and her family had become the target of harassment after neighbors discovered the family was Jewish. The woman said death threats had been stuffed into their mailbox and anti-Semitic graffiti scrawled on their front door. In February according to press reports, police said that an incident earlier that month in which a car nearly ran down an Orthodox Jewish man and his son was not anti-Semitic, contradicting a statement by the Belgian League Against anti-Semitism.
Security cameras showed the car jumping the curb and swerving towards the father and son, who were dressed in Hasidic garb. Police reportedly charged the driver with driving while intoxicated. Also in February police briefly detained a man described as a refugee after security camera footage showed him destroying at least 20 mezuzahs in Antwerp and vandalizing the doorways of several Jewish institutions. Additional footage showed the man placing a Quran near a synagogue and knocking the hat off an Orthodox Jew on the street.
Police released the man without charging him. Unia reported 82 complaints of workplace discrimination based on religion in , compared with 88 in the previous year.
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The main target of reported discriminations were Muslims. According to Unia, NGOs, and media, incidents of religious discrimination towards Muslims in both the workplace and educational institutions typically involved actions directed against women wearing headscarves and a failure to make accommodations for prayer, religious holidays, or dietary requirements. In October the National Secretary for Culture of the ACOD public service trade union, Robrecht Vanderbeeken, wrote an article for online alternative media site De Wereld Morgen accusing Israel of starving and poisoning Gaza and kidnapping and murdering children for their organs.
Wilfried Van Hoof, a private citizen, filed a complaint with Unia against Vanderbeeken. In May, according to press reports, police authorities transferred a Brussels senior police officer from his post while they investigated reports the officer had engaged in Holocaust denial and insulted Jewish subordinates. In May the League Against Anti-Semitism filed a complaint of anti-Semitism involving testimony from multiple witnesses against the head of the canine police unit in the Midi police zone of the Brussels-Capital Region. One report stated he broadcast Nazi songs and shouted that the Nazi extermination camps and gas chambers were lies.
Journalists stated young people in the group were driving the movement and organizing training and camps abroad. News articles cited boot camps with close combat and weapons training, as well as political outreach training. Media also reported the group circulated anti-Semitic messages and that Ghent University suspended its leader, Dries Van Langenhove. According to a report in the newspaper La Libre , Arabic-language training manuals for imams used in the Islamic and Cultural Center of Belgium, which included the Grand Mosque of Brussels, contained incitements to violence against Druze and Alawite religious minorities and hatred of Jews.
One manual referred to the fictitious and anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion. EU-FRA targeted Jewish populations through community organizations, Jewish media, and social networks; individuals who identified themselves as Jewish residents of Belgium responded to the online survey. Twenty-eight percent said they had witnessed other Jews being physically attacked, insulted, or harassed in the previous 12 months, and 39 percent reported being harassed over the same period. One-quarter of respondents said they had felt discriminated against because of their religion or belief; 87 percent thought anti-Semitism had increased over the previous five years.
In November on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, a monument commemorating Holocaust victims was vandalized in Ghent. In August the Brussels public transportation authority dismissed an employee after it discovered he had Nazi tattoos on his arm. Media reports did not provide further details about the case.
In October the embassy sponsored the visit of a United States-based imam, who also headed an NGO fostering dialogue, to engage with religious leaders, local police officials, NGOs, and academics on ways to promote interfaith and intercultural understanding and tolerance. Also in October the embassy sponsored a Flemish Muslim community leader who runs a network for young Muslim professionals to participate in an exchange focusing on religious pluralism.
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In November the embassy sponsored the participation of a Francophone politician and civil society leader in a training program focused on youth empowerment and tolerance. Additionally, the embassy awarded small grants to fund programs promoting religious tolerance and understanding among youth. The embassy supported the NGO Actions in the Mediterranean, led by a prominent Jewish community leader and politician, which educated high school youth of different religious backgrounds on how to work constructively and bridge divides around the topic of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
The embassy also supported a local NGO that taught negotiation skills to diverse groups of high school students from different religious and cultural backgrounds to promote mutual understanding. The embassy provided a grant to the Jewish Museum of Brussels to highlight the work of a Jewish photographer and invited disadvantaged youth groups of predominantly Muslim background to the Jewish Museum for guided tours to promote religious tolerance.
Embassy officials regularly met with religious leaders to discuss incidents of religious discrimination and ways to counter public manifestations of anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic sentiment. They continued engagement with activists from the Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish communities to promote interreligious understanding. The program focused on developing leadership skills by fostering tolerance and mutual understanding through interfaith dialogue.
In June the embassy cohosted an iftar for disadvantaged Muslim and other youth who used the arts to promote religious tolerance and inclusion during Ramadan. In July the embassy sponsored the participation of six experts on Islam from academia, NGOs, and the clergy in an interfaith program in the United States that highlighted religious freedom and interfaith relations as pathways to a more tolerant society.
The constitution and the law protect the right of individuals to choose, change, and practice religion.
The president and other government officials again condemned anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, and anti-Christian acts, and the government continued to deploy 7, security forces to protect sensitive sites, including religious ones. In June the government thwarted an attempted extremist plot to attack Muslims. In April authorities expelled an Algerian imam because of his radical preaching in Marseille. The government denied an Algerian Muslim woman citizenship after she refused to shake the hands of male officials.
Executive Summary
The government announced a action plan to combat hatred, including anti-Semitism, and a nationwide consultation process with the Muslim community to reform the organization and funding of Islam within France. Religiously motivated crimes and other incidents against Jews and Muslims occurred, including killings or attempted killings, beatings, threats, hate speech, discrimination, and vandalism. The government reported 1, anti-Christian incidents, compared with 1, in , most of which involved vandalism or other acts against property. According to government statistics, there were crimes targeting Muslims, including an attack against Muslim worshippers outside a mosque, a 17 percent decrease compared with the in The government also reported an additional 51 acts against Muslim places of worship or cemeteries.
There were anti-Semitic crimes, consisting of physical attacks, threats, and vandalism, an increase of 74 percent compared with the incidents recorded in Violent anti-Semitic crimes totaled 81, compared with 97 in A student leader at the University of Paris the Sorbonne generated considerable debate after wearing a hijab on national television. The Ambassador, embassy, consulate, and APP officials met regularly with religious communities and their leaders throughout the country to discuss religious freedom concerns and encourage interfaith cooperation and tolerance.
The embassy sponsored projects and events to combat religious discrimination and advance tolerance. The embassy funded a visit to the United States for four nongovernmental organization NGO directors on an exchange program that included themes of interfaith cooperation and religious tolerance.
It also sponsored the participation of three imams at a conference in Rabat focused on building interfaith relationships. According to the most recent study by the National Institute for Demographic and Economic Studies, conducted in and published in , 45 percent of respondents aged reported no religious affiliation, while 43 percent identified as Roman Catholic, 8 percent as Muslim, 2 percent as Protestant, and the remaining 2 percent as Orthodox Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, or other.
A poll conducted in March by the private firm Opinionway found 41 percent of respondents older than 18 years identify as Catholic, 8 percent Muslim, 3 percent Protestant, 1 percent Buddhist, and 1 percent Jewish; 43 percent said they have no religious affiliation. The MOI estimates percent of the population is Muslim. The Muslim population consists primarily of immigrants from former French colonies in North and sub-Saharan Africa and their descendants.
According to a Ipsos study published in Reforme, a Protestant online news daily, there are an estimated , Lutheran, , evangelical, and , nondenominational members in the Protestant community. Many evangelical churches primarily serve African and Caribbean immigrants. A report by Berman Jewish Data Bank estimated there are ,, Jews, depending on the criteria chosen.
According to the study, there are more Sephardic than Ashkenazi Jews.
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