Belgium’s Femicide Count Still Years Behind Schedule

Nearly a year after Belgium was supposed to begin systematically counting femicides, the country still has no official national tally. The law exists, the deadline has passed, but the numbers do not — and the gap has now widened with the collapse of the only civil-society count tracking the deaths.

The Law of 13 July 2023 on preventing and combating femicides, gender-based homicides and related violence required police and judicial authorities to collect data and the Institute for the Equality of Women and Men (IEFH) to publish an annual report, according to RTBF. Those provisions were due to take effect on 1 October 2025. As of late September 2026, no official statistics have been made public.

A Pioneering Law With a Missing Mechanism

When it entered into force in October 2023, Belgium’s femicide law was hailed as a milestone — one of the first comprehensive legal frameworks against this fatal form of gender-based violence, covering prevention, victim protection, police and judicial training and risk assessment. The law text defines femicide and distinguishes four categories: intimate (by a partner or ex-partner), non-intimate (by a third party), indirect (for example following other violence) and gender-based homicide. VRT NWS reported that it mandates both a detailed annual statistical report and a qualitative report covering frequency, conviction rates and the effectiveness of measures.

What the law does not do is create femicide as a standalone criminal offence. That omission lies at the heart of the delay.

No Box to Tick

“We don’t have a criminal offence of femicide,” said Véronique De Baets, spokesperson for the IEFH. “So to be able to count, measure and make these femicide cases visible, we don’t have a little box to tick ‘femicide’, as one could tick other types of offences.”

Without an offence category, identifying femicides requires cross-referencing the nature of the homicide, the victim’s sex, the relationship between victim and alleged perpetrator, and other variables. The problem is that different police services and different judicial services do not always collect the same data the same way — what De Baets calls “a big challenge of harmonising methodology at the data level.”

The practical fix was supposed to be an implementing Royal Decree defining the categories and indicators so the data would be comparable and usable. That decree remains unadopted. De Baets said adoption before the end of the year now looks difficult, citing data-protection concerns and opinions from police bodies that forced changes to the draft text, requiring several administrative steps — including reviews by the Finance Inspectorate, the Budget and the Council of State — to be run again.

“I fear it will be complicated to have a Royal Decree still this year,” she said.

The office of federal Minister for Equal Opportunities Rob Beenders (Vooruit) said the draft decree “was submitted for opinion to several bodies” and that those opinions “revealed legal and technical difficulties that still need to be resolved to guarantee a fully operational system.” The office said it aims to publish first figures in 2026 but offered no detail on timing, on what data would be published, or on the resources for coordinating police, justice and the IEFH.

The Last Tally Falls Silent

While the official mechanism stalled, the counting was left for years to civil society. The Stop Féminicide blog, run by the feminist platform against violence against women, had tracked cases since 2019 through a daily media watch. Coordinator Aline Dirkx described reading articles in French and Dutch containing words like “body,” “corpse,” “suspicious death,” “domestic violence” and “suicide” in search of femicides.

In March 2026, its last update recorded at least eight femicides in 2026. One month later, in April, the count stopped: two of the platform’s three subsidies were not renewed.

“Without subsidies, we can’t continue, obviously,” Dirkx said. “I would like to wake everyone up and say: Stop Féminicide is disappearing. This blog is the only counting body that has built up undeniable expertise over the years, and it is going to disappear because there is no more funding. We expect associations to do all this work that isn’t being done, that isn’t taken up by the state. But we don’t want to fund them, we weaken them. It’s terrible.”

The blog was never an exhaustive public accounting, but it gave visibility to cases that would otherwise have gone uncounted. Its interruption, coming at a moment when no official figures exist, deepens Belgium’s data void.

“Femicides are a reality that exists here, that is terrible,” Dirkx said. “At least two people are killed per month in Belgium and are victims of femicides. It’s a phenomenon that is here. We absolutely must make it visible. We need to put figures on it, but also faces and names on those figures.”

That estimate is consistent with earlier reporting. VRT NWS found in November 2024 that around two women a month were dying at the hands of a (former) partner, with roughly 20 victims recorded that year.

Falling Short of International Obligations

Belgium is bound by the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention, which requires states to regularly collect and publicly release statistical data on femicides. In a report published in November 2025, GREVIO — the body monitoring the convention’s implementation — judged Belgian data to be “lacunaires” and “fragmentées” across institutions, recommending better disaggregation by sex, age, form of violence and the victim-perpetrator relationship, as reported by RTBF.

A 2024 EU directive strengthens statistical requirements on violence against women and domestic violence, including victims killed in that context. Its transposition deadline is 14 June 2027, so it would be premature to consider Belgium already in breach on that European timeline.

De Baets acknowledged that even future figures will need care. Some facts can only be characterised as femicides months or years after the events, meaning counts may need to be revised and contextualised rather than presented as final.

What to Watch

The IEFH still hopes to publish a first report this year, even if partial. “The Institute wants to be able to produce a first report this year, even if it is partial and even if some data are not yet available,” De Baets said.

“Measuring and making femicides visible is indispensable,” she added. “We cannot end up in a situation where we have no information.”

Whether that first report materialises now depends on the Royal Decree, on data the police and justice system can supply, and — with the civil-society stopgap gone — on political will to close a statistical gap that has already outlasted its deadline by nearly a year.