Belgium’s Femicide Count Still Missing a Year On
Nearly a year after data-collection provisions under Belgium’s 2023 “Stop Féminicide” law were supposed to take effect, the country still has no official tally of femicides. According to RTBF, the Institute for the Equality of Women and Men (IEFH) hopes to publish a first report before the end of 2026, even if it is only partial.
“We cannot find ourselves in a situation where we have no information,” IEFH spokesperson Véronique De Baets told RTBF, stressing that measuring and making femicides visible is indispensable.
A legal obligation, an unfinished system
The law of 13 July 2023 on the prevention of and fight against femicides, gender-based homicides and violence—presented at the time as a European first—requires police and justice services to collect data and the IEFH to publish an annual report. Those provisions were meant to apply from 1 October 2025.
Why the delay? The law is a framework law, not a reform of the Criminal Code. Femicide is therefore not a standalone criminal offence, and there is no dedicated box to tick. To identify cases, institutions must cross-reference the nature of the homicide, the sex of the victim, the relationship between victim and alleged perpetrator, and other details that police and justice services do not collect uniformly.
“We don’t have a criminal offence of femicide,” De Baets explained. “There is a big issue of harmonising methodology at the data level. Several services at the police level and several services at the justice level sometimes collect the same data differently.”
An implementing royal decree must define the categories and indicators that would make the data comparable. According to De Baets, its adoption before year-end now looks difficult: data-protection remarks and opinions from police bodies forced changes to the draft, requiring fresh opinions from the Finance Inspectorate, the Budget and the Council of State.
The office of federal Equality of Opportunities Minister Rob Beenders (Vooruit) said the draft decree was submitted for opinion to several bodies and that these revealed legal and technical difficulties that still need to be resolved. The cabinet says it aims to publish first figures in 2026, without giving a precise calendar.
Civil-society count falls silent
Until this year, the only regular monitor of gender-based killings was the blog Stop Féminicide, run by the Feminist Platform Against Violence Against Women. Since 2017 it had tracked cases through media monitoring—Google Alerts in French and Dutch and daily reading of articles mentioning keywords such as corps, cadavre, mort suspecte and violence conjugale.
“Each day I have to read every article containing words like body, corpse, suspicious death, domestic violence, suicide… I have to read everything in both languages, sort it and try to identify articles that really concern a femicide,” coordinator Aline Dirkx told RTBF.
The blog stopped counting in summer 2026 after two of its three subsidies were not renewed. Reporting differs slightly on the timing—RTBF places the halt in April 2026, while La Libre points to early August.
Before shutting down, Dirkx had counted eight femicides since the start of 2026 and at least 27 in 2025, per the RTBF Grenades weekly recap. Separately, a Université des Femmes analysis cites 26 direct femicides plus one indirect femicide in 2025—a discrepancy that reflects differing methodologies.
“Femicides are a reality that exists here, that is terrible. At least two people are killed per month in Belgium and are femicide victims,” Dirkx said. “We must put figures but also faces and names to these figures.”
With both the official count and the civil-society count unavailable, Belgium now faces a double vacuum of data.
International pressure mounting
Belgium is bound by the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention, which requires states to regularly collect and publicise statistical data on femicides. The convention’s monitoring body, GREVIO, has repeatedly urged Belgium to better disaggregate its data by sex, age, form of violence and the relationship between victim and perpetrator—recommendations echoed in the Université des Femmes analysis of the law’s first two years.
A 2024 EU directive further strengthens statistical requirements on violence against women and domestic violence. Its transposition is due by 14 June 2027, meaning it would be premature to consider Belgium already in breach of that deadline.
De Baets also noted that some acts can only be characterised as femicides months or years after the fact, meaning future figures may be revised and contextualised rather than presented as definitive.
What’s next
The immediate goal, the IEFH says, is to avoid a statistical void. But the gap between the law’s ambition and its implementation has been a recurring theme since it was passed. As the Université des Femmes analysis puts it, the law—voted almost unanimously in the previous legislature—has enabled notable advances, including training and a first court ruling in 2024, yet its practical effects remain incomplete without sufficient human, financial and organisational resources.
For now, Belgium has a legal framework for counting femicides but no numbers to show for it. The question of who will fill that gap—and when—remains unanswered.