The final hearing in the Delphine Boël case postponed to September 10

The hearing concerning the request for recognition of paternity of king Albert II vis-à-vis Delphine Boël will not take place Thursday as initially planned. Due to the coronavirus crisis, the proceedings have been postponed until September 10, lawyers for the two parties told Belga on Tuesday.

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Last January, Albert II had announced, through the voice of his lawyer, that the results of the DNA tests showed that he is indeed the biological father of Delphine Boël and that he decided to no longer oppose the request of her to be recognized as her daughter.

The Brussels Court of Appeal is to hear the parties one last time before making a final decision. But it is already clear that Albert II no longer opposes the request made by Delphine Boël. Presumably, therefore, the court ruling will confirm that Delphine Boël is the legal daughter of Albert II.

Alain Berenboom, counsel for the former King of the Belgians, confirmed the position of his client. “We will no longer challenge legal authorship at this hearing,” he said on Tuesday. “But there are still other points to be discussed.” These are, according to counsel, matters relating to the name Delphine will choose to bear. She will be able to keep the name of Boël under whom she has been known until now, or to bear the name of the one who will soon be a legal father, therefore “de Saxe-Cobourg”, the name of the royal family of Belgium , via a surname change procedure.

There will also be a question of the title of “princess of Belgium” that Delphine might wish to take.

But counsel for the latter, Me Marc Uyttendaele, did not wish to comment on these questions at this stage.

On January 27, Albert II announced that he would no longer contest his paternity with regard to Delphine Boël, and that he would therefore no longer oppose her request to be recognized as her legal father.

In May 2019, the Brussels Court of Appeal had first ruled in favor of the Belgian artist, presented since 1999 as the illegitimate daughter of Albert II, by establishing that Jacques Boël was not his legal father.

The court then ordered Albert II to submit to a DNA test, the results of which, kept secret, were to be used in the paternity recognition procedure which Delphine Boël intended to initiate.

The former sovereign then appealed to the Court of Cassation against these decisions, but was rejected.

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