Belgium Still Has No Official Femicide Count

Nearly a year after a legal deadline required Belgium to begin officially counting femicides, the country still has no national tally. The law exists on paper, but a key implementing decree remains blocked, and the only independent count that had tracked the killings for years has itself been forced to stop.

The law of 13 July 2023 on the prevention and combating of femicides required police and justice services to collect data on gender-based killings and tasked the Institute for the Equality of Women and Men (IEFH) with publishing an annual report. Those provisions were due to apply two years after the law entered into general force, that is, by 1 October 2025. As of October 2026, no official national statistics have been published, RTBF reported.

A law without an offence

The central obstacle is technical and methodological. The 2023 law defines femicide but does not make it a standalone criminal offence. As a result, there is no single field in police or justice databases in which a case can be flagged.

“On n’a pas d’infraction penale de feminicide. Et donc, pour pouvoir calculer, mesurer, visibiliser ces cas de feminicide, on n’a pas une petite case dans laquelle on peut cocher ‘feminicide’, comme on pourrait cocher d’autres types d’infractions,” IEFH spokesperson Veronique De Baets told RTBF. In other words, there is no box to tick.

To identify cases, institutions must instead cross-reference the nature of the homicide, the victim’s sex, the victim-perpetrator relationship and other data — information that is not collected consistently across police and justice services. “Il y a un gros enjeu d’harmonisation de la methodologie au niveau des donnees,” De Baets said.

The 2023 framework, described at the time as historic in Europe, provides three definitions: intimate femicide (the intentional killing of a woman by a partner or family member); non-intimate femicide (the intentional killing of a woman by a third party, often in contexts of sexual exploitation, trafficking or abuse of power); and indirect femicide (a death resulting from practices harmful to a woman’s health, or a suicide caused by domestic violence or female genital mutilation), as RTBF detailed when the law passed.

The decree is still blocked

Concrete implementation of the data collection depends on a Royal Decree that must define the categories and indicators to be reported so the data are comparable and usable. According to De Baets, adopting it before the end of 2026 now looks difficult. Delays stem from remarks on personal-data protection and opinions from police bodies, which forced the draft text to be modified and several administrative steps — including reviews by the Finance Inspection, the budget office and the Council of State — to be restarted.

“Je crains que ce soit complique d’avoir un arrete royal encore cette annee,” De Baets said. The office of federal Equal Opportunities Minister Rob Beenders (Vooruit) told RTBF that the draft decree “a ete soumis pour avis a plusieurs instances” and that those opinions “ont fait apparaitre des difficultes juridiques et techniques qui doivent encore etre resolues.” The office says it aims to publish first figures in 2026 but gave no details on the decree’s timeline or on resources for coordination between police, justice and the IEFH.

Despite the likely absence of a decree, the Institute still hopes to publish a first report this year. “L’Institut veut pouvoir produire un premier rapport cette annee, meme s’il est partiel et s’il y a certaines donnees qui ne sont pas encore disponibles,” De Baets said. She stressed that figures may need to be revisable: “Il y a des faits qui peuvent etre caracterises comme etant des feminicides plusieurs mois ou plusieurs annees apres.”

The volunteer count has stopped

Until now, the only national count came from the blog Stop Feminicide, run by the feminist Platform against Violence against Women (PFVFF), which tracked cases through media monitoring since 2017. Two of its three subsidies were not renewed, and the count has been halted since April 2026. The blog has functioned as Belgium’s de facto data source, relying on searches in French and Dutch for terms such as “corps,” “cadavre,” “mort suspecte,” “violence conjugale” and “suicide.”

Coordinator Aline Dirkx was blunt about the consequences. “Sans subsides, on ne peut pas continuer,” she told RTBF. “J’aimerais bien reveiller tout le monde et dire : Stop Feminicide est en train de disparaitre,” she added. “Ce blog, c’est le seul organe de recensement qui a construit au cours des annees une expertise indéniable et il va disparaitre parce qu’il n’y a plus de financement.”

Dirkx has insisted the phenomenon is real and under-measured. “Il y a au moins deux personnes qui sont tuees par mois en Belgique et qui sont des victimes de feminicides,” she said. “Il faut mettre des chiffres mais aussi des visages et des noms sur ces chiffres.”

What the numbers show

Without official figures, the available data come from civil society and prosecutorial statistics. VRT NWS reported that 14% of homicide or attempted murder cases are linked to partner violence, and 13% of those have a fatal outcome — amounting to at least 123 victims who died between 2021 and 2024, an average of about 30 per year. There were seven times as many attempted murders in a partner-violence context. These figures count trials, not victims, and do not indicate victim or perpetrator gender.

Civil-society estimates place the toll higher. RTBF’s Les Grenades reported that at least 25 femicides plus one indirect femicide were recorded in 2025, while noting the real figure is underestimated. Experts warn that some killings are recorded as suicides, disappearances or accidents, and some cases only emerge years later. Joelle Tetart of the DIViCo device in Liege has advocated for systematic autopsies. “Je plaide par exemple pour des autopsies systematiques car je pense que certains feminicides se cachent derriere des causes accidentelles ou des suicides,” she said.

International obligations

Belgium is bound by the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention, which requires states to regularly collect and make publicly accessible statistical data on femicides. In its November 2025 GREVIO report, the monitoring body judged Belgian data incomplete and fragmented across institutions, recommending better disaggregation by sex, age, form of violence and victim-perpetrator relationship. A 2024 EU directive reinforces statistical requirements on violence against women, with a transposition deadline of 14 June 2027 — meaning Belgium is not yet formally in breach of that instrument.

A scientific committee, but no counting yet

Separately, Belgium established a Scientific Committee for the analysis of femicides, which began work after its creation was announced on 9 December 2025, as the IEFH documents. Modelled on domestic homicide reviews in the United Kingdom and Norway, the committee conducts retrospective, “no blame, no shame” analyses to draw structural lessons. It is chaired by scientists from the National Institute of Criminalistics and Criminology.

But the committee is not a counting body, and critics say it excludes the very people who have done the counting. “Aujourd’hui, nous ne sommes pas invitees aux discussions, et nous ne faisons pas partie de ce Comite, alors que nous sommes les seules a avoir recense les feminicides depuis 2017 dans notre pays,” Dirkx said.

In Parliament, Ecolo MP Sarah Schlitz has repeatedly pressed the government on the delay. Speaking in the Health and Equal Opportunities committee on 28 January 2026, she argued that official counting is a duty of the state. “Dans un contexte de reduction des moyens des associations, la moindre des choses est que le politique prenne en charge ce decompte des feminicides,” she said, according to her published account of the exchange. Beenders replied that the decree contains “dispositions tres techniques” requiring close coordination, adding: “Notre objectif est bien de disposer d’un premier rapportage des 2026.”

What to watch

Belgium arguably has one of Europe’s most advanced legal frameworks for confronting femicide — yet the counting machinery it mandates is still not running, and the volunteer effort that filled the gap is winding down. Whether the Institute can produce even a partial first report in 2026, and whether the Royal Decree clears its remaining hurdles, will determine whether Belgium ends a years-long statistical blind spot or leaves it in place.

“Mesurer et visibiliser les feminicides, c’est indispensable,” De Baets said. “On ne peut pas se retrouver dans une situation ou on n’a aucune information.”