BRUSSELS — Belgium’s Constitutional Court ruled last Thursday on the laws that anchor the federal government’s asylum crackdown, and its message fits in one sentence: the state can restrict an asylum seeker’s material support, but never automatically, and never by category.
Judgment 110/2026 of 24 September, listed on the Court’s own docket under cases 8586 and 8587, is the latest chapter in a legal fight that has been running all year. At its centre sit two laws of 14 July 2025, piloted by Asylum and Migration Minister Anneleen Van Bossuyt as part of what the De Wever government calls the strictest migration policy in Belgian history. One law treats an asylum application as a “subsequent application” — with sharply reduced rights — when the person has already received a final decision, positive or negative, in another EU member state. The other lets Fedasil, the federal reception agency, limit or withdraw material help in a wider set of circumstances.
Last week the Court made three distinct moves, and they do not point in the same direction.
First, it declined to rule — for now — on the flagship measure, the refusal of reception to people already protected elsewhere in the EU. That question was suspended in February, then sent to the Court of Justice of the European Union, and the Constitutional Court is waiting for Luxembourg’s answer before it decides anything. The biggest fight, in other words, is parked.
Second, it did rule on a quieter provision with sharper edges: the power to limit, or in exceptional cases withdraw, material support when a minor files their own asylum application after their parents’ claim has been definitively rejected. Here the Court attached real conditions. According to the analysis by the Flemish Bar’s legal service, such a decision can only follow an individualised examination of the concrete situation of the child and their family. The particular vulnerability of minors must be weighed, there must be concrete indications that the asylum procedure is being abused, and the best interests of the child must remain an essential consideration in every reception decision. An automatic cut is not allowed. Read the conditions again and you see the shape of them: one child, one file, one decision at a time.
Third, the Court closed the file on provisions that no longer exist. Part of the challenge had become pointless, it noted, because those articles were already annulled by its judgment 66/2026 of 21 May — the ruling that struck down the abolition of financial assistance as an alternative form of reception. The remainder of the appeal was rejected, subject to an interpretation the Court itself spelled out.
That May judgment still echoes. Annulling the end of financial assistance, the Court warned that when the reception network is saturated and no other material help is available, the impossibility of falling back on financial aid creates a risk of substantial harm to the right to human dignity. Lawyers Antoinette van Vyve and Julien Wolsey, who represented applicants, said the words were harsh but matched the violations committed by a government and a parliament that had preferred to ignore the Council of State’s prior warnings, as VRT reported at the time. Minister Van Bossuyt answered that the ruling would have little practical impact — everyone entitled to reception currently has a place — while complaining that the constitutional framework makes deep asylum reform “almost impossible”. She said she would apply the judgment.
Whether “apply” is the right verb has been the year’s running question. When the Court suspended parts of the same laws in February — family reunification rules included — the minister announced within days that Belgium would keep refusing reception to people protected elsewhere in the EU under a different legal basis, a stance Euronews documented in detail. The Council of State then suspended that workaround too, in extreme urgency, warning it exposed people to “a situation of complete destitution” and sleeping in the street. Five hundred Fedasil employees eventually signed an open letter asking their own minister to respect court rulings and shelter those still being denied their rights. When the people who run the reception system petition their minister to follow the law, something unusual is happening.
And the pressure is not only domestic. In April, the European Court of Human Rights found that Belgium’s failure to house asylum seekers — despite national court orders — amounted to degrading treatment, awarding each applicant between roughly 5,000 and 12,000 euros. Strasbourg’s underlying point was the same one Brussels keeps making: a court order is not a suggestion.
For the child at the centre of last week’s provision, none of this is constitutional theory. It is the difference between a caseworker opening a file and a rule switching off a bed. The Court has now said, in binding terms, which of the two Belgian law requires. What it has not yet said — because Luxembourg goes first — is whether the government’s broader refusal policy can survive at all. That answer will decide far more than one Thursday in September.
