Jacqueline Goegebeur, target of discrimination, Belgium
Belgium ratified the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR) in 1955! And yet a few months later I couldn’t be born as a legal child of my parents and why a few months later my brother 6 years old could be forced by the Belgian community to become a boy gardener, and why 2 years later gendarmes forced me and my sister, to group us with the others in a mulatto institute in order to transport us to Europe without any consent of my mother.
We obtained an apology and recognition of the injustices, now we will continue our search for the truth and for a just and equitable reparation. Because today we are still living the reality of these same discriminatory rules conceived in the racism proper to the Belgian Colonization, we still don’t possess valid birth papers, it is still impossibility to meet the family to whom are systematically refused the visa, and some still don’t have the access to the nationality.
Copyright Simone Padovani
