Melchior Wathelet

Melchior Wathelet, of the Christian Social Party, was Belgium's minister of justice when, on April 6, 1992, he signed the ministerial order granting Marc Dutroux conditional release. On April 26, 1989, the Court of Appeal of Mons had sentenced Dutroux to terms of ten years, three years and six months for the rape of children and minors and the sequestration of five young girls. The prosecutor-general of Mons, Demanet, had given a negative opinion, writing that granting such clemency "at a time when rape and assaults on elderly people are denounced as a social scourge would go against the imperatives of repression and the needs of public safety and would be likely to discredit the work of justice."²

The parliamentary commission of inquiry into the Dutroux affair, which heard Wathelet in 1997 as "judge at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, former minister of justice," found that while the files on the conditional release of Michelle Martin and Dutroux appeared to have been prepared in the usual way, their follow-up had been wholly inadequate, and that "the responsibility of the minister of justice of the time, Mr. Wathelet, must be retained"; it attributed to the prosecutor's office of Charleroi the failure to inform the minister on three occasions of facts that could have led to the release being revoked.² Dutroux abducted Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo on June 24, 1995.² Wathelet was a judge of the European Court of Justice from 1995 to 2003.³

Accusations in the X-Dossier

In the X-Dossier, compiled under Judge Jean-Marc Connerotte and Prosecutor Michel Bourlet, the witness Regina Louf (X1) accused Wathelet of raping her as a child at parties organized by Jean-Michel Nihoul and at sadomasochistic events on the estates of Count Leopold Lippens and Baron Benoit de Bonvoisin and at villas in Knokke-Heist near the Royal Zoute Golf Club, and identified him from photographs; the writer S. Dovey wrote that X2 placed him at events near Chimay. Dovey also wrote that the dossier linked him with Paul Vanden Boeynants and the Lippens family through the Christian Social Party and its backers at the Societe Generale de Banque, and with parties filmed for blackmail. Dovey further linked the allegations to Operation Gladio stay-behind networks and wrote that prison reports had warned against Dutroux's release. Wathelet denied the accusations, attributing them to political rivals. He was never charged, and the X-witnesses were not heard at the 2004 trial.¹