Sangari arrived as a minor, which meant the government was bound to give him refuge until he was 18, when the procedure to return him started. This week, federal migration secretary Maggie De Block said she would examine ways to make it possible to send minors home sooner, by joining Belgium to the European Return Platform for Unaccompanied Minors, an organisation based in the UK which includes Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands among its members, and whose aim is to help young people return to their homelands as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, protestors criticised De Block’s refusal to intervene, as the law allows her to do, and as she did recently in a case involving a young man from Cameroon living in Boortmeerbeek, who was allowed to remain in Belgium to finish his studies.