Anyone who insults the King of the Belgians must be jailed for at least six months and up to three years.

It has been in the code of law since April 6, 1847.

The monarchy was only a few years old, and a regent from German high nobility sat on the throne.

However, the law has rarely been applied and there will be no new cases, as the Constitutional Court has now decided: it violates the right to freedom of expression.

Thomas Gutschker

Political correspondent for the European Union, NATO and the Benelux countries based in Brussels.

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For the Spanish rapper Valtònyc, this has very practical consequences.

He is not allowed to be transferred from Belgium to Spain, where he has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison for glorifying terrorism, threatening death against a politician and denigrating the royal family.

Because Brussels can only execute the European arrest warrant issued by Madrid if the acts are also punishable in Belgium.

The rapper born in 1993 with the real name Josep Miquel Arenas glorified the Catalan underground organization ETA in his texts and made provocative statements about the royal family. In a song he called for their summer residence in Palma de Mallorca to be armed. Another line said that the king had “an appointment in the village square with a noose around his neck”. In 2017, he was convicted on the basis of a controversial "Citizens' Safety Act" passed by the Conservative government in response to street protests. His appeal was rejected on the grounds that the texts were not covered by freedom of expression and freedom of artists. He escaped custody in May 2018 by fleeing to Belgium,like several Catalan politicians before after the independence referendum in 2017.

A court in Ghent refused his extradition, as did the court of the European Union in Luxembourg. The Belgian state appealed, however, referring to the old law on libel of majesty. The Appeals Chamber then turned to the Constitutional Court and asked for a preliminary ruling on whether this law was compatible with the right to freedom of expression in the Belgian Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights. The answer was crystal clear. The law was passed in a "fundamentally different context", protects the reputation of the king in a "disproportionate manner" and therefore violates the constitution.

The judges also relied on a decision by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

In 2011, in a case that also concerned the Spanish crown, he ruled that a politically neutral head of state could not avoid public criticism because he himself represented the constitution.

A king should therefore not enjoy greater protection than any other citizen.

After that, several European countries had adapted their legislation, including the Netherlands.

There the maximum sentence for insult was reduced from five years imprisonment to four months.