The Belgian committee of UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund) became the center of a child pornography scandal in 1987 when its director and another employee were arrested for operating a child pornography studio in the basement of the organization's Brussels headquarters. In June 1987, police arrested [[UNICEF]], the 63-year-old director of UNICEF's Belgian committee, and charged him with inciting minors to debauchery. The arrest followed the discovery of a secret photographic studio in the basement of the Brussels building where the committee's offices were housed. The studio was used to take pornographic photographs of children, many of whom were of North African origin. Police seized more than 1,000 such photographs along with a mailing list of some 400 names in 15 European countries prepared on the UNICEF office computer.[^1] According to an investigator named Andrew Rogge, the UNICEF computer system was used to serve clients of a network, and a police commissioner named Yves Zimmer told him, "You can drop this affair. We will not be able to go further. Some of the clients are highly placed." Similar videos were found at UNICEF headquarters months later, and a Swiss member of the [[CRIES]] network was later arrested for attempting to sell these films in the UK. British police helped uncover the child-sex ring run from a cellar under the Brussels offices of UNICEF. The youngest child in the films was an eight-month-old baby, and the oldest only 12.[^1] ### Connections to CRIES and Spartacus [[Jean-Paul Dumont]] had acted as the attorney for a number of high-profile individuals implicated in the child porn operation housed in the UNICEF headquarters. The UNICEF scandal was linked to the [[CRIES]] network, which was itself connected to the [[Spartacus Network]]. It appears [[Beat Meier]]'s arrest with his [[Spartacus International|Spartacus]]/[[PAN Magazine|PAN]] associate [[Roger Lawrence]] in late January 1987 led to the arrests of his [[CRIES]] associates later in March, and then finally those at UNICEF in July. The chain of arrests traced the connections from the [[Spartacus Network]] through [[CRIES]] to the UNICEF headquarters operation, demonstrating the integration of these organizations within a single distribution infrastructure for child pornography.[^1] ### Footnotes [^1]: Dovey, S. (2023). *Eye of the Chickenhawk*. United States: Thehotstar.