The Brussels official in charge of liaising with the European institutions says expats should not fear violent crime in the Belgian capital, insisting it is confined to the city’s “rotten” areas.
Brussels is in the grip of a drug war between organised crime gangs and has already seen nearly 60 shootings this year, including 20 this summer, two of which were fatal. The city’s public prosecutor, Julien Moinil, has been living under police protection since receiving death threats and has described the violence as an “alarming trend”.
But Alain Hutchinson, the Brussels commissioner for Europe and international organisations, played down the risk in an interview with Euractiv.
“These incidents don’t happen where the international civil servants live and work. “It happens in the rotten parts of the city, in Anderlecht, in Molenbeek, in places like this,” he said.
He added that the problem is not unique to Brussels. “It’s a drug problem. You have these kinds of problems in Paris, in Rome, in London, in all the big cities,” he added.
Hutchinson, who also operates a “welcome desk” for newcomers to the city, said the expats he meets are “not at all” worried.
“Here in the European quarter we never – touch wood – had this kind of problem and we’ve never heard any complaints about this,” he said. “We have social ghettos, we have cultural ghettos in the city, but you have that in all cities.”
European civil servants make up around 23% of Brussels’ population, and they have not been entirely shielded from the recent violence. In 2023, a European Parliament MEP assistant was wounded by a stray bullet at Porte de Namur.
The ‘office ghetto’
Hutchinson, appointed to the role in 2014 by Brussels’ long-serving Socialist minister-president Rudi Vervoort, would normally have left office after last year’s regional elections. However, the political parties in Brussels have been unable to form a government for over a year, so he has remained in post.
He said that his long-standing goal has been to make the European quarter more liveable and diverse. “We don’t want the quarter to stay as it is, which is an office ghetto,” he said. “Not so many years ago the European institutions were … working inside their walls, and they didn’t want to know what was happening outside. This is finished.”
The European Commission has since sold off office space, some of which is being converted into housing and schools. But Hutchinson criticised the Flemish nationalist-led federal government for its hostile stance towards these plans.
Earlier this year, the regional authorities sent a letter to the EU institutions asking for more funding to complete a renovation of the Schuman roundabout – a move Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever called a “total humiliation”.
Hutchinson has rejected that charge. For De Wever, “it is just one more reason to talk badly about Brussels,” he said.
“He’s against the region so everything he can do to destroy the region … he will do it,” Hutchinson said of De Wever. “He is fundamentally a Flemish nationalist.”
A spokesperson for De Wever said: “Brussels is the capital of Flanders. Any Flemish nationalist therefore takes the interests of Brussels to heart.”
(vc, de)
