[ad_1]
Eighteen students who put young black men through a notorious fraternity hazing ritual at a prestigious Belgian university, which led to his death and started a national debate on racism, were convicted of involuntary manslaughter on Friday and ordered to pay fines and do community service. .
Sanda Dia, a 20-year-old student at the Catholic University of Leuven, now known as KU Leuven, died of multiple organ failure in December 2018. She had been forced along with two other fraternity pledges to drink excessive amounts of alcohol, fish oil until she vomited , swallowed live goldfish and stood outside in a trench filled with ice.
Friday’s decision, by the Antwerp Court of Appeal, appears to put an end to a case that has passed through the Belgian justice system for five years. The court found all 18 students guilty of involuntary manslaughter and degrading treatment, but acquitted them of charges that included culpable negligence and administering dangerous substances causing death or illness.
The students — all members of the Reuzegom fraternity, which traditionally attracts the country’s elite — were each sentenced to perform 200 to 300 hours of community service and pay a fine of 400 euros, or about $430.
The students, who have never been fully named in public, will also pay compensation to Mr. Dia’s father, sister and stepmother, who will receive a total of 15,000 euros, 8,000 euros and 6,000 euros, or approximately $16,000, $8,500 and $6,400. The student will also pay Mr. Dia’s mother the amount requested as compensation: 1 euro.
Lawyers for the students argued that Mr. Dia’s death was a tragic case of wrongful hazing, and that the student’s family had fought to keep his anger out of his criminal record.
One of the lawyers, John Maes, praised the decision on Friday as “balanced and well-reasoned,” according to Belga, the Belgian news agency.
In comments to the Belgian press, the lawyer for Dia’s family, Sven Mary, expressed his disappointment at the verdict.
“It is difficult for the family to hear that no one has been found guilty of culpable negligence or for administering fish oil,” said Mr. Mary.
But he advised against advising the family to appeal the decision: “Should I advise these people? I don’t know if I will do the service.
Because the students involved do not speak about the matter publicly, he added, the family will not know exactly what happened until Mr. Dia’s death.
“In the end, we didn’t get any answers because of the silence that the children had,” he said. “We will never know. This is hard for the family to deal with.”
After Mr. Dia’s death, local news outlets uncovered details about the brotherhood, whose members include the sons of judges, business leaders and politicians, infuriating many Belgians.
On a separate occasion, for example, a fraternity member used a racial slur when Mr. Dia ordered him to clean up after a party. Photos also surfaced showing members of the fraternity wearing Ku Klux Klan robes. The fraternity’s speech referred to its “good German friend, Hitler,” and a video showed members singing racist songs about Belgium’s brutal colonial history in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
A deleted WhatsApp message, found by the police, showed members of the fraternity trying to cover their tracks after the death.
“It was not an accident,” Mr. Dia’s brother, Seydou De Vel, said in an interview in 2020.
“He thought, ‘They’re just some black people, we’re strong and nothing can happen,'” his father, Ousmane Dia, said in an interview at the time.
The case has caused many people in the Dutch-speaking community of Flanders to face long-standing questions about endemic racism, especially as details emerge about the fraternity along with the late reckoning of Belgium’s history in the Congo and the spread of Black Lives Matter demonstrations around the world.
Mr. Maes appeared to point to that larger debate, saying on Friday that the court had “raised the language of war in recent years.”
Others expressed anger at the verdict. “Eighteen people humiliated and abused Sanda Dia in 2018. No one intervened until it was too late,” Kenny Van Minsel, who was the leader of the student body at KU Leuven when Mr. Dia died, wrote in Dutch on Twitter. “Sentences, fines & not to mention possible negligence. This is beyond madness.”
After Mr. Dia’s death, the fraternity was disbanded, but some blamed the university for being slow to take disciplinary action against students.
After an initial investigation in 2019, the students involved were ordered to do community service and write a paper on the history of hazing. The following year, KU Leuven reported that it had started a new investigation after gaining access to the criminal file of the case.
In 2021, the school announced “final disciplinary sanctions” against seven students still enrolled at the university, expelling them and barring them from re-enrolling for several years or, in some cases, ever.
[ad_2]
Source link