“We are encouraging our foreign ministry to try and recognize this as a genocide legally on the European scale. If the Yazidi genocide is recognized legally, then the perpetrators will be punished, right now neither the International Court of Justice nor any other court has recognized it,” Els Van Hoof, a member of the Belgian Parliament for the Christian Democratic and Flemish (CD&V) party told Rudaw’s Hemen Abdulla.
Belgium approved a resolution to recognize the Yazidi genocide in late June, joining several countries that have officially recognized it.
The Netherlands parliament also followed and recognized the genocide last week.
Regarding the process, the Belgian representative said that testimonies from many people were taken.
“We had many reports, and we met with experts, witnesses, and victims, the most important testimony was that of Nadia Murad in front of our commission. Apart from that, many professors from America and Belgium spoke to us, and the result was what happened was a genocide, because people were killed systematically, and it was against a specific nation,” she said.
“That is the definition of genocide, we found out that their men were killed, their women were sold as sex slaves, and their children were deceived and used as a fighting force,” she added.
More than 6,000 Yazidis were kidnapped when ISIS attacked their heartland of Shingal in Nineveh province, according to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Office for Rescuing Kidnapped Yazidis. Over 2,000 remain missing.
Evidence has established that the ISIS crimes committed against the group “truly” constitute genocide, Karim Khan, head of the United Nations Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Daesh/ISIL (UNITAD) told the UN in May.
Van Hoof said that with their approach, the hope is that other countries will follow the same way the Netherlands did.
“We have seen before when a member state of the European Union does something like this, other countries will follow,” she said. “We consider this topic very important because when it comes to the violation of human rights, it is not an internal issue of a country, but a global issue.”
