Was there even a knife? Pieter Aerts died almost 5 years ago by police bullet, but parents remain in the dark about exact circumstances to this day

It is not the first time that things have gone wrong when the police are confronted with psychological and/or vulnerable people. Just think of Jonathan Jacob, who died in a police cell in Mortsel in 2010, or Jozef Chovanec, who died in 2018 after the police restrained him in a police cell at Charleroi airport.

The League for Human Rights recently took civil action in the Pieter Aerts case, precisely because they “see similar elements in this case with other cases of police violence”. “David versus Goliath”, Kati Verstrepen of the League calls it. “In recent years we have seen more and more people dying in contact with the police and that is deeply disturbing. The right to life is the most fundamental right we have, and the police are there to protect us. We don’t often intervene individual files, but there is a very large inequality of arms here and this file is part of a larger project.”

According to Verstrepen, there are a number of pain points, and communication is one of them. “Communication often goes wrong immediately after the facts. It only comes piecemeal, the information is contradictory, victims have to look for details themselves. That should not be allowed. There is also regularly a lack of transparency in subsequent investigations.”