Montreal Gazette
20 January 2010
By Sue Montgomery, Gazette Justice Reporter January 20, 2011
(Picture: Eric Dejaeger, a Roman Catholic priest, was placed on Interpol’s wanted list in 2002 after he fled to his native Belgium. He was returned to Canada on Wednesday.)
MONTREAL – A Belgian Roman Catholic priest who escaped prosecution for 15 years for alleged sex crimes against Inuit children was returned to Canada on Wednesday because of an immigration violation in his native country.
Eric Dejaeger, 63, landed in Montreal on Wednesday and was to board a commercial flight to Iqaluit, Nunavut, on Thursday to face six sex abuse charges for crimes allegedly committed on boys at least 30 years ago.
The mayor of Igloolik, a town of about 2,000 near Baffin Island, where the crimes allegedly took place, said people were relieved to hear the news of Dejaeger’s arrest.
“It’s a close-knit community where everyone knows everyone,” Lucasi Ivvalu said. “So everyone suffers.”
Dejaeger seems to have escaped justice all these years because Belgium wasn’t aware he’d become a Canadian citizen in 1977, even though it’s clearly stated in the RCMP file, RCMP Superintendent Howard Eaton said in a phone call from Iqaluit.
After having lived in Canada’s Arctic since the 1970s, Dejaeger was sentenced in 1990 to five years in prison on nine counts of sexually abusing children in Baker Lake, on the west coast of Hudson Bay. In 1995, after Dejaeger served his term, more alleged victims came forward from Igloolik. Dejaeger failed to show up in court and fled to his native Belgium.
Interpol placed Dejaeger on its wanted list in 2002.
But Belgium has a 10-year statute of limitations on child sex crimes that kicks in once the victim reaches 18, and therefore wouldn’t extradite Dejaeger – who they thought was still a Belgian citizen – to be tried in Canada, where there is no time limit for prosecution.
“The fact he was Canadian seems to have escaped a lot of people. I don’t know why it didn’t come out, because we have photocopies of his Canadian papers in his file,” Eaton said. “There were attempts to get him out of (Belgium) but they outright refused.”
Dejaeger was living as a free man until last fall, when authorities discovered that his Belgian passport had in fact expired in 1997, making him an illegal immigrant in his birth country.
Belgium’s Foreign Affairs Ministry said in a statement in September that Dejaeger didn’t inform Belgian authorities that he had become a Canadian citizen and he gave “false information about his nationality” to Belgian consular officials in Canada.
He was told this month to hand over his Belgian identity card, which he no longer had a right to carry, and was arrested and ordered deported.
“As soon as they had the ability to act, they acted,” Eaton said. “He’s not the kind of guy you want hanging around your country.”
Dejaeger was held in a detention facility for illegal migrants in Bruges until his departure for Canada on Wednesday.
Ivvalu said Dejaeger’s four alleged victims, all of whom are now grown men with families, have suffered for years.
“It’s going to bring back sad memories, and hopefully there’ll be a healing process after that,” he said.
smontgomery@montrealgazette.com
Rusty_Shackleford
12:02 PM on January 20, 2011
There’s an easy solution for this; strip him down, throw him in a round room naked, send in 3 muscled-up, steroid-filled individuals … 2 to pin him down while spreadind his legs apart and the other to shove a baseball bat right up where the sun don’t shine … and maybe, just maybe, he’ll feel a fraction of what his victims felt … There is no need for the governments to waste my (taxpayer) money on this individual to feed, cloth, and relax inside a prison at my expense … And when he croaks, donate his body and organs to medical students for science and research …
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anonymous
9:35 AM on January 20, 2011
And God said suffer the little children….I don’t think what the preists did was what he meant.
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hot rod jane
8:22 AM on January 20, 2011
OUR FATHER WHO ART IN HEAVEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Way to go Father you priest are doing a real good job keep sweeping the problem under the rug.