For some years now, Brussels has become the European city that attracts the largest number of spies. Intelligence agents from foreign countries, and European officials convinced to pass information in exchange for money, have intensified their illegal activities in the capital of Belgium, home to the institutions of the European Union and NATO, and the city that hosts the largest number of missions diplomats from all over the world. One of the reasons for such intense and widespread activity is that espionage is not a crime in Belgium, and attempts to change the law have so far failed, largely due to the complicated Belgian political situation.
The issue of foreign espionage in Brussels has returned to much discussion in recent months, after two former EU officials were accused of passing confidential information to China: Britain’s Fraser Cameron and Germany’s Gerhard Sabathil. Furthermore, the Belgian authorities confirmed a precedent last May inquiry of The world which claimed that China was using the Malta Embassy building to spy on the European Commission headquarters in Brussels (the two buildings are facing each other).
Similar stories, however, have been repeated for years. Already in 2018, in a very in-depth article on the subject, Politico he told in detail that Brussels had surpassed Vienna as the “European city of spies”. A Belgian intelligence agent quoted in the article, and who remained anonymous for security reasons, claimed that even then there were more spies in Brussels than there were in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, therefore in the period end of the Cold War.
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Despite the various inquiries, and the general increase of cases of espionage in Brussels uncovered in recent years, the tools available to the Belgian security forces remained very limited, and ineffective.
Belgian law, which does not recognize espionage per se as a crime, only provides that a person is committing a crime if he passes confidential information on a matter of national interest to a hostile or foreign power. The law, which leaves ample room for interpretation, dates back to the 1930s and has not undergone substantial changes since then, becoming mostly obsolete and ineffective. To try to overcome the problem, the Belgian authorities have long since begun to be “creative”, as reported by journalist Barbara Moens his Politico.
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The methods used are mainly two, Moens explained. The first is to tell the press about the allegations to the suspect of espionage, putting him in a complicated position and compromising his ability to obtain confidential information. This method has also been used for the last two big cases of espionage in Brussels. The allegations against Sabathil were revealed to newspapers by the German authorities, although no charges had been brought. A similar thing happened with Cameron: the accusations were made public by a spokesman for the Belgian security forces, who claimed that Cameron was “a clear threat to European institutions” due to his espionage activities.
The second method used by Belgium is to try to indict suspects for offenses other than espionage, such as belonging to criminal organizations or violating telecommunications laws. This system has also been used on several occasions, for example against former Belgian diplomat Oswald Gantois, suspected of passing information to the Russian secret services and convicted in 2018 for criminal association for the purpose of counterfeiting. Gantois himself said he acted “a little too much like James Bond.”
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The Belgian government has long been discussing the possibility of changing the law and introducing the crime of espionage.
The Minister of Justice, Koen Geens, of the Christian Democrats and Flemings, a center-right pro-European party, is trying to get new measures approved that among other things include sanctions for economic and scientific espionage. So far, Geens’ efforts have led to nothing, especially because of the troubles of Belgian politics. In fact, Belgium has been without a government for almost two years, from the end of 2018 to today (a memory), the day on which an agreement was announced between various political forces e a new prime minister, Alexander de Croo. It is unclear whether the new government will continue Geens’ efforts, or whether it will prioritize other issues deemed more urgent.
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