The Namur criminal court sentenced Belgian-Congolese Julienne Mpemba to ten years in prison on Thursday October 10 for the kidnapping of children in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and their illegal adoption in Belgium.
1 min
With our correspondent in Brussels, Laxmi Lota
Julienne Mpemba had created the Tumaini orphanage, in DRCin 2008. In 2015, the former lawyer from Namur had eleven children adopted from Kinshasa, in Belgium. Adoptions carried out for large sums of money. Thursday, October 10, the Namur criminal court sentenced her to ten years in prison for kidnapping of minors, hostage-taking, fraud, corruption, and forgery and use of forgery.
Adopted children were absolutely not orphans. They were kidnapped. Julienne Mpemba passed her orphanage off as a holiday camp to Congolese parents. The Belgian families did not know that these were kidnapped children. The court emphasizes that, for the defendant, “ children were only a commodity to be sold at the highest price by exploiting the distress of adoptive parents “.
In the DRC, biological families have finally obtained official recognition of the kidnapping of their children. It is the Belgian family and youth court which must now rule on the fate of these minors. Now teenagers, they have two families.