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Belgian NGOs have no balls. They will not go to court to fight for their cause. (fedia.io)

submitted 3 months ago by ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io to c/Belgium@europe.pub

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If you need to take court action over human rights offenses, these are the human rights NGOs:

UNIA
Vlaams Mensenrechteninstituut (only Flanders and Brussels /if/ regd as Dutch speaking)
Ligue des droits humains
Association pour le droit des étrangers
Amnesty Intl Belgium

The three listed after UNIA basically say “we have a tiny budget; no money for court. Go to UNIA- that’s the big well-funded national human rights org.”

UNIA generally just ignores complaints. But if you can get them to talk, they say “We do not go to court. We only negotiate.”

Amnesty Intl is quite useless as well. They don’t have funding for court actions. They write letters once a year and get many signatures. They say that gets some results but they only target a dozen or less specific and extreme cases -- and they’re outside of Belgium (e.g. Gaza).

If you need to take court action over consumer rights offenses, we have:

Testachats: “We do not go to court. We only negotiate.”
Jury d’Ethique Publicitaire (JEP): self-regulates ad business. Absolutely useless. Will not intervene on false advertising.
BEUC (Europe-wide): basically useless. They’re just a cheerleader for EU consumer lawmaking. No budget for court.

Negotiate with what leverage? It must be well known that UNIA and Testachats don’t do court, so why would any offender of human rights or consumer rights compromise anything?

For privacy, only EDRI has a Belgian presence. They are EU-wide in scope so Belgium-specific matters are of no interest to them. NoyB has no Belgian presence but they are more inclined to talk than EDRI. Neither of them finance court actions AFAICT.

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[–] iii@mander.xyz 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

For privacy there's also https://ministryofprivacy.eu/

Relying on the courts is indeed no use. They're intentionally obtuse and unreachable. And in most cases, the largest offenders are our own governments, who ignore court rulings anyways (1).

Technical solutions will always be best. Followed by a change in executive branch.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 3 months ago

The ministry of privacy website uses Sucuri to block Tor. So they have a hypocrisy problem. But I’ll have a look anyway. Just because the web admin isn’t on par with their mission doesn’t mean they aren´t useful.