Since I don’t want to play ’pig in a poke’, I’ll be quick to clarify that the question posed in the title refers to EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders (66), who, at first glance, might seem to be the archetype of a European bureaucrat but once you dig deeper into his past, this image fades pretty quickly.
Didier Reynders’ Carreer Path
It may be unorthodox, but I shall start with this year given that 2024 is going to be a year of major re-shuffles in the EU – the EP will be reconstituted, the Presidents of both the European Commission (EC) and the European Council (EuCo) will have to be re-elected, just like many other top officials. A new EuCo with new European commissioners will also be set up.
The players concerned have started to prepare early for the elections in June. So did the Belgian federal government which decided in early January to support the candidacy of Belgian EU Justice Commissioner Mr Didier Reynders, to become the next secretary general of the Council of Europe (CoE). It’s important to note that the Strasbourg-based CoE which is an intergovernmental organisation is not a part of the European Union institutions. It has 46 member countries and includes the European Court of Human Rights. CoE concentrates on human rights, democracy and rule of law.
Reynders, a Belgian liberal politician from the French-speaking Reformist Movement (Mouvement Réformateur – MR) party, decided to compete for one of the top jobs in Europe following EuCo President Charles Michel in January announced his intention to run for a seat in European Parlament. As both of them belong to the MR, for which only two seats projected, Reynders had nothing to do but to try to choose another job. Ultimately, he picked up the position of Secretary General of the CoE which can certainly be desribed as a second-rate elephants’ graveyard for ageing European politicians. (Sincere apologies to the elephants!)
Carreer in a Nutshell
Mr Reynders, a trained lawyer, who is serving as European Commissioner for Justice since 2019, has built an enviable carreer – in his home country Belgium, he held various positions in public institutions in the last couple of decades. He served not only as Finance Minister but later also as Foreign Minister and Defence Minister of Belgium. He also worked as deputy PM.3
Based on his carreer path, one can say with certainty that the only thing he couldn’t grab immediately is the position of the Secretary General of the Council of Europe – a top job for which Reynders announced his candidacy in 2019 but failed to succeed. Following this failure, the then Belgian PM Charles Michel – who later became head of the European Council – passed Reynder’s nomination as chief justice official to the new Commission. After having spent five years as European Commissioner, Reynders again became the Belgian goverments’ candidate for the position as Secretary General of the Council of Europe. Judging by his determination to get this job, there may be something in the background that attracts him to this relatively weightless institution.
From Africa With Love: Corruption Allegations and a Never-ending Love Story with Congo
Based on Didier Reynders’ carreer in Brussels so far, one might say that he’s just a typical Brussels bureaucrat who’d never left the safety of the European bubble.
But if you add his affiliation to African Development Bank (AfDB), Asian Development Bank (ADB) and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the situation is a little bit more interesting as these snipplets of information indicate that occasionally, he does escape the safe European arena. Add to that the fact that during his job as justice commissioner in von der Leyen’s team, Reynders was targeted by Israeli spyware Pegasus in 2021. Taking these interesting facts into account, the outlines of an upper middle class European figure emerge who has attracted the attention of governments both in Europe and elsewhere.
The most fascinating part is yet to come and that is Reynders’ long-standing ties to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) which may be an explanation of many unclear situations, including the above issue regarding the Pegasus spyware. (Please note that Belgium was the colonial power in Congo until its independence in 1960.)
In 2019, just a couple of months before he was appointed as European Commissioner, he faced a probe in Belgium into allegations of corruption and money laundering. According to Belgian news outlets, the probe began after a former Belgian intelligence officer went to the federal police claiming bribes had been paid linked to public contracts such as the construction of Belgium’s embassy in Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC. The then Foreign Minister Reynders, of course, denied any wrongdoing. As the preliminary investigation couldn’t reveal a hard evidence, the prosecutors dropped the case, although ’kickbacks had been laundered by selling cheap antiques and art at high prices’, Belgian De Tijd claimed in its report. ’Payments were believed to have come from arms dealers and a Congolese presidential election candidate’, the newspaper added, citing the former intel officer’s testimony.
It’s to be noted that the period between 2018 and 2019 was a remarkable one in Belgian-Congolese relations: after that in July 2018 Reynders signed with Congolese MFA Jean-Claude Gakosso a Memorandum of Understanding, top officials from Belgium and Congo signed various agreements aimed at normalizing relations between the former European colonial power and the DRC during an official visit of Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi to Belgium. The memorandum signed by the then Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders and his Congolese counterpart Marie Tumba Nzeza also includeed the reopening of consulates, regular bilateral consultations and a program aimed at training Congolese diplomats, AP News Agency reported from Brussels.
After a short pause, Reynders’ name popped up again in the context of Congo, though, indirectly, when a new ambassador of Belgium to the DRC arrived in 2023. In addition to being the first woman in this job, there’s one more important detail concerning Ms Roxande de Bildering namely that earlier she worked in the cabinet of former Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders.
In September 2023, Reynders drew attention with his official visit to the DRC just a couple of months before the then upcoming presidential elections. He faced fierce criticism due to the timing of this visit. According to official sources, he not only participated in a conference on transitional justice but also met some members of the government, in addition he also held talks with President of Congo. With the top Congolese officials, he discussed the war in Ukraine and its impacts on the DRC and, the Congolese judicial system, the fight against corruption and the prison situation. No further details are available on these talks.
’Nice exchange with the Federation of Enterpreneurs of Congo (FEC), the mining cooperative EMAK-C and the mining sector union called BEST on social responsibility and the duty of vigilance of companies in the mining sector in RDC’, Reynders said on X, during the same visit to the DR Congo in September 2023. In view of this tweet, it’s probably not far wrong to conclude that Reynder’s passion for Congo may be linked more to the local mines and their profits than his sincere commitment to human rights. For a better understanding, it’s important to emphasise that the DRC has the world’s largest reserves of cobalt and the seventh largest reserves of copper.
As for Reynders’ meeting with the representatives of the mining sector of Congo, many locals had similar thoughts, given that Reynders received on Twitter comments like this: ’You’ve been hunted all over West Africa and you want to take advantage of Mr Tshisekedi’s (Congolese President) naivety to come to our country?’
New Directions: Rule of Law Reports and Unwavering Support of Ukraine
In recent years, a couple of things have distracted Mr Reynders from his beloved Congo. Since 2019, he was busy with ’critically important European issues’ such as rule of law reports on Member States which really required a lot of energy and full focus.
In line with the new direction of the a new Commission in 2019, Didier Reynders has indeed put a major accent on rule of law issues in his job as European Commissioner for Justice. Thanks to his commitment, rule of law reports on Poland and Hungary were the top news stories in the EU in recent years. It should be added that following a kind of resting point has been reached, in January 2024, Reynders was criticized in European Parliament over an alleged background deal with these two countries to free the frozen funds. Whether the allegations are true or not, we’ll probably learn one day.
In the last couple of years, Reynders as Justice Commissioner’s been actively envolved in negotiations with Ukraine which country undoubtably enjoys Reynder’s full support on its European path. It’s been him who claimed that, in general terms, Ukraine performs satisfactory in the context of judicial reforms and other criteria the country has to fulfil in the process of its Euro-integration. (The truth is that Ukraine met only two criteria out of seven.) In addition, he’s also been active in creating a vision for the establishment of the Special tribunal for the crime of aggression against Ukraine. With his Ukrainian counterparts, he also discussed possible legal solutions to use frozen Russian assets for rebuilding of Ukraine. ’Your courage deserves a European response that is up to the task’, he said in his opening remarks at the United for Justice Conference held in March 2023.
Why is CoE Good for Reynders?
Though the CoE’s most famous achievement, the European Convention on Human Rights goes back to 1950 and CoE is often considered an institution with no real importance, it still has some significant ’branches’ and tasks. Among them, it’s worth mentioning the European Court of Human Rights, the Venice Commission which provides legal advice and the so-called GRECO evaluation reports about anti-corruption situation in states.
The question is, what is Didier Reynders actually seeking at Europe’s human rights’ watchdog? First of all, he obviously wants to make money to increase the amounts already set aside for retirement. According to the website of CoE, the annual budget of the Council of Europe for the year 2024 is € 299 million which assumes that there is no shortage of fundings available to pay the general secretary’s salary.
Shadows of the Past can Even Pose a Security Threat
In light of Reynder’s previous positions and his unflagging passion for Africa, it’s reasonable to assume that he intends to use ECHR to push the projects he has already launched – by this one should obviously mean his keen interest in the Congolese mining sector. In this context, one particular circumstance shouldn’t be ignored.
Today, all over the world, a lot of attention is paid to the underlying phenomenon – struggling with the ghosts of a colonial past seems to be difficult for many former colonial powers, including Belgium. The relationship between Belgium and its former colonies is a complex field of research, the academic results of which show, among other things that what hasn’t been handled in centuries, cannot be changed in one fell swoop just because public opinion and historians would expect it. Moreover, as is well known, the last thing to change is human behavior.
Didier Reynders’ love for Congo may be unilateral, and the former Belgian colony may be ready to get rid of its former master, but short-term economic and political interests in that corner of Africa may override this, while the seemingly boring Belgian éminence grise, under the guise of human rights, is more than happy to seize the opportunity.
The Belgian politician may have already forgot that when in December 2016, on behalf of the Belgian MFA on platform X he urged citizens of Belgium to leave Congo on fears of violance, he received comments such as ’Don’t come back please!’ and ’You don’t help us. You just leave when the time is bad.’ He also seems to forget an incident in 2015 when he was accused of racial insensivity and ignoring Belgium’s colonial past after he appeared at a charity event with a blackened face.
In light of all this, whether Didier Reynders will hold the desired job at the CoE by the end of the day or not – he must compete with former Swiss president and Estonia’s former culture minister-, it’ll be worth monitoring his activities in the future. Since the embassy in Kinshasa is one of the key posts for Belgian diplomacy, and it is now Reynders’ closest confidante who serves as ambassador there, it’s unlikely we have to wait for another official visit by Reynders which will include further discussions with the representative of the local mining industry and top Congolese politicians who actually control the cobalt and copper mines.
Didier Reynder’s passionate love for Congo is clearly fake but even this fake love or, more diplomatically, his ’long experience’ with Congo, can pose serious risks even threats to a European top official who has quickly moved from the Belgian political elite to a position as European Commissioner and now dreams of another top job in Strasbourg. There’s one question that needs to be asked, namely, what does he have to offer in return for Congo to give him something particularly valuable? His personal influence, possibly? An éminence grise, a crashing bore bureaucrat who acts under the influence of a foreign state? Well, after the Qatargate scandal, anything’s possible.