Crime and courts in Belgium, in English

The first is Antwerp. Its port is the main European entry point for cocaine, and the enforcement around that — container seizures measured in tonnes, corrupted dock workers, encrypted-phone investigations — drives a large share of the country's crime coverage. The second is Brussels, where competition over that trade has produced recurring shootings in specific neighbourhoods, most of them between people known to each other.

Both are serious and both get flattened in international coverage into something they are not: a general collapse in safety. Belgium's overall crime and homicide figures do not support that reading. Reporting a shooting without the context that it was targeted, or a record seizure without the fact that seizures rising can mean enforcement improving, produces a picture that is wrong in a predictable direction.

So the briefs here stay close to what is established: who, where, what the police or the prosecutor actually said, what stage a case is at. Suspects are not named before a court does. Where a story is a claim rather than a finding, it says so.

Court reporting in Belgium also runs on a longer clock than most readers expect — an assize trial can begin years after the event — so a verdict in the feed is often the first many people hear of a case since it happened.