Belgium is reshaping heritage protection through a combined legal and policy shift that emphasizes restoration over punishment and treats cultural heritage as a living, reparable resource rather than a static asset. The 2026 recast Penal Code reorients criminal justice toward proportionality and restorative justice by limiting short prison sentences, expanding non-custodial sanctions, and strengthening corporate accountability, thereby creating space for reparative measures such as restoration work or heritage education in cases of damage to cultural objects. Although not heritage-specific, the framework allows courts to address cultural harm beyond mere market value, especially when protected sites are involved. In parallel, Wallonia’s heritage policy—led by the Agence Wallonne du Patrimoine—invests heavily in training traditional craftspeople and supporting active archaeology, ensuring the practical capacity for meaningful restoration and ongoing discovery. Together, these reforms suggest an emerging model in which damage to heritage is addressed through repair, skills transmission, and renewed engagement with the past, rather than solely through retribution, with implementation now the key test of their transformative potential.
*Intro by ArtLaw.club
Maria Boicova-Wynants, IP lawyer and IP strategy consultant, Art law lawyer
Introduction: Beyond the Museum's Velvet Rope
When we think of heritage protection, the image that often comes to mind is one of quiet preservation: a historic building roped off from the public, a fragile artifact under glass, a policy of careful, passive maintenance. It's a world of looking, but not touching; of preservation, but not necessarily of active engagement or restorative justice.
Belgium is charting a different course, quietly but deliberately. With a comprehensive Penal Code recast taking effect in April 2026 (08/04/2026), coupled with ongoing heritage management reforms in the Wallonia region, the country's approach to cultural protection is evolving. This analysis explores the broader implications of these legal and policy shifts, examining what they signal about how heritage damage is understood, sanctioned, and repaired.
A Shift Toward Restorative Justice
Belgium's 2026 Penal Code recast represents a significant philosophical reorientation in criminal justice. The reform explicitly positions imprisonment as an ultimum remedium, the absolute last resort, requiring courts to justify why non-custodial sanctions would be insufficient. This shift moves the system away from purely punitive approaches toward a model that emphasizes alternatives to incarceration, including community service, mediation, and other non-custodial measures.
The new code introduces a tiered system of sanctions that largely removes short prison terms from the lower end of the scale while maintaining serious penalties for grave crimes. This structure creates room for more proportionate and restorative responses, particularly for offenses where direct repair of harm is possible.
While the code doesn't explicitly carve out heritage-specific restorative mechanisms, the broader structure of the code creates space for such applications. The emphasis on alternatives to imprisonment and the expansion of community service options creates space for application in cultural heritage cases, for instance, requiring offenders to participate in restoration projects or contribute to heritage education programs.
The idea of cultural harm beyond market value is increasingly discussed in scholarship and professional practice. Its translation into Belgian criminal case law, however, remains uneven.
Expanded Corporate Accountability
The 2026 reform strengthens Belgium's approach to corporate criminal liability. Belgian corporate criminal liability has existed for years, but the reform continues the move toward clearer parallel accountability, allowing both legal persons and the decision-makers behind them to be held responsible.
Corporate sanctions have been expanded and modernized. Courts now have greater flexibility in imposing penalties that go beyond traditional fines, including requirements that corporations undertake specific remedial actions. While the code doesn't explicitly detail heritage-specific corporate sanctions, the framework suggests several possibilities:
Courts could potentially order corporations that damage cultural sites to fund or directly undertake restoration work, supervised by qualified conservation experts. This would transform penalties from abstract financial costs into concrete obligations to repair the specific harm caused. Additionally, when offenses are motivated by financial gain, judges may impose profit-based penalties that exceed the economic benefit obtained from cutting corners or ignoring preservation requirements, neutralising profit as a motive.
The code also requires judges to seek proportionality between offenses and penalties while considering potential negative consequences such as impacts on employees or local economies. This nuanced approach attempts to balance accountability with broader social and economic considerations.
Modernizing Vandalism and Graffiti Law
The 2026 Penal Code modernizes Belgium's approach to vandalism and property damage, consolidating what were previously separate and sometimes contradictory statutes. The reform integrates graffiti within the broader framework of property damage while maintaining proportionate responses based on severity.
The reform reduces the role of short prison sentences and pushes low-level property damage toward non-custodial responses. In practice, that can shift how minor graffiti is handled, often through local enforcement tools rather than federal imprisonment.
The legal calculus changes once protected heritage is involved. While the code doesn't specify an explicit multi-tier graffiti framework, the general provisions for property damage distinguish between minor infractions and serious harm. Vandalism that targets historically significant structures or causes substantial damage can be prosecuted more severely, with penalties reflecting the cultural importance of the damaged property and the difficulty of restoration.
This approach allows the system to focus its most serious resources on acts that cause irreparable harm to cultural patrimony while handling minor infractions through more proportionate local measures.
Wallonia's Investment in Heritage Skills
While the federal Penal Code addresses justice for heritage crimes, Belgium's Wallonia region has taken a different but complementary approach through proactive heritage management. The Walloon Heritage Code (CoPat) was adopted in 2018 (and later consolidated, with a refreshed code in force since 1 June 2024). The Agence Wallonne du Patrimoine (AWaP) has been operating since 2018 as the integrated heritage agency.
A core tenet of this approach is that preserving historic buildings requires preserving traditional craftsmanship. The AWaP's training mission addresses the critical shortage of artisans skilled in historical restoration techniques—knowledge that is disappearing as practitioners retire without successors.
The agency operates training worksites (chantiers-école) where restoration projects double as hands-on classrooms. These sites allow trainees to learn specialized techniques—such as sgraffito mural restoration—under expert supervision while contributing to actual conservation work. This model ensures that rare skills are transmitted to a new generation while advancing real preservation projects.
This investment in human capital is essential to making any restorative justice approach viable in practice. Courts can only mandate authentic, expert restoration if qualified craftspeople exist to perform the work. The AWaP's training programs help ensure that capacity exists when needed.
Heritage as Ongoing Discovery
The AWaP's archaeological mission reframes heritage not as a fixed catalogue of known sites but as an ongoing process of discovery that can reshape historical understanding. Wallonia treats its cultural patrimony as a living field of inquiry rather than a static inheritance by actively supporting excavations and research.
Recent archaeological work demonstrates this dynamic approach. Excavations at Chèvremont, conducted since 2023 by AWaP in collaboration with the University of Liège, have revealed a significant site with connections to the Carolingian period, preserved in exceptional condition. These findings add new dimensions to regional history and deepen understanding of medieval settlement patterns.
Other projects continue to uncover medieval vestiges that were previously unknown or poorly understood, including ecclesiastical structures and burial sites. Each discovery has the potential to rewrite local narratives and connect communities more tangibly to their past.
This active archaeological engagement transforms heritage from a static object of preservation into something immediate and evolving, with new chapters continuously being written.
Conclusion: An Evolving Model
Belgium's parallel legal and policy reforms—the 2026 Penal Code recast and Wallonia's integrated heritage management—suggest a shift toward more restorative, proportionate, and forward-looking approaches to cultural preservation. The Penal Code's emphasis on alternatives to imprisonment and corporate accountability creates potential frameworks for heritage-specific applications, even where such provisions aren't explicitly codified.
Wallonia's investment in artisanal training and active archaeology complements this legal evolution by ensuring that restoration is both possible and meaningful, that courts ordering reparative measures have access to skilled craftspeople, and that heritage itself remains a dynamic field of ongoing discovery rather than passive preservation.
Whether this model represents a fully realized new standard or an emerging philosophy still taking shape, Belgium's approach raises important questions for other jurisdictions. As heritage faces increasing threats from development pressures, climate change, and social disruption, the balance between punishment and restoration, between protecting what we know and discovering what we've forgotten, becomes ever more critical.
The ultimate test will be in implementation, namely how courts apply these new legal tools, how training programs scale to meet demand, and whether the restorative philosophy translates into tangible outcomes for damaged heritage. These questions will be answered not in legislative texts, but in restoration workshops, courtrooms, and excavation sites across Belgium in the years ahead. Ultimately, in how seriously society treats damage to its shared past.
Disclaimer:
I am not a criminal defence lawyer, and this piece does not claim to offer a doctrinal analysis of Belgian criminal law. It is written from the perspective of an IP and art law practitioner observing how recent penal reforms may interact with heritage protection in practice. I therefore welcome nuance, correction, and debate from colleagues who work daily in Belgian criminal and penal law.
About the author:
Maria is an IP lawyer and IP strategy consultant, helping SMEs make their competitive advantage sustainable. Currently, Maria heads her own IP strategy consulting practice - Wynants & Co Strategic IP Solutions. She is a Latvian Patent and Trademark Attorney, European Trademark and Design Attorney, as well as European Mediator in civil and commercial cross-border disputes for over two decades. Maria's main areas of expertise are IP strategy, contractual relations, securing IP rights, alternative dispute resolution, and IP training. She is also Mediator and art law expert on the list of the Court of Arbitration for Art (the Hague), Mediator on the WIPO ADR Centre’s List of Neutrals, IP Due Diligence Expert on the list of the European Innovation Council, and tutor in various IP topics with CEIPI/IP Business Academy/EPO. Maria holds an MBA degree from Vlerick Business School, LL.M. (MIPLM) from CEIPI/University of Strasbourg, and is currently working on her PhD thesis on the impact of digitalization on the IP management practices within companies. She can be reached via LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariaboicovawynants or by sending her a message directly to her e-mail: [email protected].
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