Students in Belgium with hazing are sentenced to fines and conscription

Eighteen students who put a young black man through a notorious hazing ritual at a prestigious university in Belgium, which led to his death and sparked a national debate about racism, were convicted Friday of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to pay fines and community service.

Sanda Dia, a 20-year-old student at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, now known as KU Leuven, died of multiple organ failure in December 2018. he vomited, swallowed live goldfish, and stood outside in an ice-filled ditch.

Friday’s decision by the Antwerp Court of Appeal seemed to put an end to a case that had been winding through the Belgian legal system for five years. The court found all 18 students guilty of involuntary manslaughter and degrading treatment, but acquitted them of, among other things, culpable neglect and administering a harmful substance that caused death or illness.

The students – all members of the Reuzegom fraternity, which traditionally attracts scions of the country’s elite – were each sentenced to perform 200 to 300 hours of community service and pay fines of 400 euros, or about $430.

The students, who have never been fully named in public, will also pay damages to Mr. Dia’s father, brother 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 students will also pay Mr. Dia’s mother the amount she requested as compensation: 1 euro.

The students’ lawyers have maintained that Mr. Dia’s death was a tragic case of gone hazing, and the students’ families have fought to keep the conviction out of their criminal records.

One of their lawyers, John Maes, praised the decision on Friday as “balanced and well-founded,” according to Belga, a Belgian news agency.

In comments to the Belgian press, lawyer for the Dia family, Sven Mary, expressed his disappointment with the verdict.

“It’s hard for the family to hear that no one has been found guilty of culpable negligence or administering the fish oil,” said Mr. Mary.

But he suggested he wouldn’t advise the family to appeal the decision: “Should I recommend that to these people? I don’t know if I would be doing them a favor by doing that.”

Because the students involved did not speak publicly about the case, he added, the family would not know exactly what happened prior to Mr Dia’s death.

“In the end we didn’t get an answer because of the boys’ silence,” he said. “We’ll never know. This is hard for the family to deal with.”

After the death of Mr. Dia, local news outlets uncovered details about the brotherhood, whose members included the sons of judges, business leaders and politicians, which angered many Belgians.

For example, on another occasion, fraternity members used racial slurs when they told Mr. Dia to clean up after a party. A photo has also surfaced showing a fraternity member wearing Ku Klux Klan robes. A fraternity speech referred to “our good German friend, Hitler,” and a video showed members singing a racist song about the ruthless colonial history of the Belgians in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Deleted WhatsApp messages recovered by police showed fraternity members trying to cover their tracks after the death.

“This was not an accident,” Mr Dia’s brother, Seydou De Vel, said in a 2020 interview.

“They thought, ‘He’s just a black man, we’re powerful and nothing can happen to us,'” his father, Ousmane Dia, said in an interview at the time.

The case spurred many in Flanders’ Dutch-speaking community to confront long-standing questions about endemic racism, especially as details of the brotherhood emerged alongside a belated reckoning of Belgium’s history in the Congo and the spread of Black Lives Matter demonstrations worldwide.

Mr. Maes seemed to allude to those larger debates, saying on Friday that the court had risen “above the war language of recent years”.

Others expressed outrage at the verdict. “Eighteen people humiliated and tortured Sanda Dia in 2018. Nobody intervened until it was too late,” wrote Kenny Van Minsel, who was a leader of the student organization at KU Leuven when Mr. Dia died, in Dutch on Twitter. “Punishments, fines and no report of culpable negligence. This is beyond madness.”

After Mr. Dia’s death, the fraternity was dissolved, but some accused the university of being slow to take disciplinary action against the students.

After an initial investigation in 2019, the students involved were instructed to perform community service and write a paper about the history of hazing. The following year, KU Leuven reported that this was the case started a new investigation after obtaining access to the criminal file of the case.

In 2021, the school announced “final disciplinary punishmentsagainst the seven students who were still enrolled in the university, leaving them unable to re-enroll for several years or in some cases, ever.