Update of 23 July 2026
Since this article was published on 15 April 2026, two developments have occurred. The bill was passed, and the Court of Justice of the European Union answered the question on which the analysis depended.
The bill was adopted without change. The text voted is identical to the articles adopted in first reading by the committee (DOC 56 1377/005), and the six articles were passed without amendment in second reading (DOC 56 1377/004). The Act of 30 April 2026 amending the Act of 15 December 1980 on access to the territory, residence, establishment and removal of foreign nationals was promulgated and published in the Belgian Official Gazette. None of the Council of State's reservations (Opinion No. 78.486/4 of 15 December 2025) was addressed by any change to the text. The lifetime entry ban therefore enters Belgian law exactly as tabled.
On 23 April 2026, one week before promulgation, the Court of Justice delivered its judgment in Case C-446/24 (Freie Hansestadt Bremen v DT). The Court ruled that Article 3(6) and Article 11(2) of Directive 2008/115/EC do not preclude an entry ban of unlimited duration imposed, in principle, on an irregularly staying third-country national subject to a return decision based on a terrorist threat. It attached one condition. The competent authority must be able to take due account of all the circumstances specific to each individual case, both to establish the threat and to justify applying the scheme to the case at hand.
The central argument of our analysis, the alleged incompatibility in principle between an unlimited duration and the directive's notion of a specified duration, no longer holds. The debate shifts to individual assessment. A lifetime entry ban is permitted only at the price of a concrete, genuine and verifiable examination of each person's situation. This is where the weaknesses identified before the vote remain, the ones the parliamentary works themselves left open. The proportionality of a lifetime measure applied to a twelve-year-old child was never answered across the readings. Lifting the ban on professional or educational grounds remains subject to a twenty-year period, at the individual's sole initiative, without any ex officio review.
The parliamentary works also confirm the largely symbolic character of the scheme. Several members, including from the majority, noted that the persons targeted, listed in the T.E.R. database, are most often already the subject of an international arrest alert, so they would in any event be kept out of the territory. The minister stated that it was the Belgian government which, in the negotiations on the future EU Return Regulation, had opposed the lifetime entry ban. That proposed regulation, which provides for a duration cap in principle, remains at proposal stage, so the Belgian law is not yet overtaken by an adopted EU text. The legality of the scheme, as defended before the committee, rests on the case-by-case judicial proportionality review under Articles 3 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. That is precisely the point the Court of Justice now makes a condition of validity. The whole reach of the lifetime entry ban will therefore depend on how effective that review proves to be.
Original article: 15 April 2026
On 26 February 2026, the Belgian government tabled a bill amending the Act of 15 December 1980 on access to the territory, residence, establishment and removal of foreign nationals (DOC 56 1377/001). The bill would allow the Immigration Office to impose lifetime entry bans on persons registered in the T.E.R. database (Terrorism, Extremism, Radicalisation), namely terrorists, potentially violent extremists and hate preachers residing irregularly in Belgium.
The Council of State issued an opinion (No. 78.486/4 of 15 December 2025) with serious reservations. The bill was nonetheless tabled without adequately addressing them.
1) What the bill provides
The bill introduces three substantive amendments to the Act of 15 December 1980.
First, it inserts the concept of a "lifetime" entry ban into Section 1, § 1(8), alongside the existing fixed-duration ban.
For EU citizens and their family members (Section 44nonies, § 2), a lifetime entry ban becomes possible if the person is a "validated entity" registered in the T.E.R. database. This ban is limited to Belgian territory, not the Schengen area.
For third-country nationals (Section 74/11, § 1), a removal order may be accompanied by a lifetime entry ban covering the entire Schengen area.
An application to lift the ban on professional or educational grounds may only be filed after twenty years (Section 74/12, § 1, second paragraph). A lift for "humanitarian reasons" remains possible without a waiting period, but only at the individual's initiative (Section 74/12, § 1, first paragraph).
2) The Council of State's reservations
Opinion No. 78.486/4 identifies several areas of vulnerability.
The most significant reservation concerns compatibility with Directive 2008/115/EC. Article 3(6) of that directive defines an entry ban as a measure of a "specified duration". A lifetime ban is, by definition, of unspecified duration. The Council of State notes that the CJEU is currently seized of a preliminary reference in Case C-446/24, concerning a similar national scheme. The compatibility of the Belgian bill with EU law therefore depends on the Court's answer.
The Council of State also raises the question of proportionality with regard to minors. The concept of "validated entity" covers persons aged twelve and over (Section 2(4)(a) of the Act of 29 March 2024). The Council of State asks the government to justify that a lifetime ban is proportionate when applied to a twelve-year-old. The government's response, which simply refers back to the 2024 Act without specific reasoning, does not resolve this concern.
Finally, the Council of State points to a gap in the link between removal from the T.E.R. database and the continuation of the ban. The government states that removal from the database "has no immediate effect" on the lifetime ban. The measure may therefore outlast the administrative basis on which it was imposed: a decoupling that raises questions of legality and proportionality.
3) The disconnect with the evolving EU framework
In parallel, the European Commission tabled on 11 March 2025 a proposal for a regulation replacing the 2008 Return Directive with a common return system (COM(2025) 101 final). On 9 March 2026, the European Parliament's LIBE committee adopted its amendments to the proposal.
The EU text provides for a system of entry bans not exceeding ten years in principle, extendable in successive five-year periods. Permanent bans would only be possible where a person is considered a security risk, under the amendments adopted by the LIBE committee.
If the regulation is adopted in a version that constrains or precludes automatic lifetime bans, the Belgian bill will be overtaken before it has even taken effect. The government acknowledges this in its explanatory memorandum, while stating that it "is not considered appropriate to await the outcome of these development(s) at the European level".
4) The bill's weaknesses
CJEU case law requires individualised assessment of entry ban duration. The Filev and Osmani judgment (C-297/12) confirmed that Article 11(2) of Directive 2008/115 requires the duration to be set by reference to all circumstances of the individual case. The K.A. judgment (C-82/16) further requires that family life and the best interests of minor children be taken into account, including where an entry ban is already in force. The mechanism allowing a lift only after twenty years, and only at the individual's initiative, does not guarantee the kind of periodic ex officio review that these requirements call for.
On the ECHR side, the explanatory memorandum cites only the judgment of 25 March 2010 (Mutlag v. Germany, No. 40601/05), without analysing more recent case law. Yet the Advocate General's conclusions in Case C-446/24 refer to the ECtHR judgments in Kaya v. Germany of 28 June 2007, Sharafane v. Denmark and Al-Habeeb v. Denmark of 12 November 2024, and Miari v. Denmark of 15 July 2025, which address the proportionality of entry bans under Article 8 of the Convention (right to respect for private and family life). The bill's authors do not engage with these judgments.
The SIS Regulation (EU) 2018/1861 provides, in its Article 39(2), for a review of the alert within five years. The explanatory memorandum presents this as a "horizontal safeguard". However, this review concerns the alert in SIS, not the underlying entry ban decision itself. Equating the two is questionable.
Céline Verbrouck
Attorney at the Brussels Bar
Specialised in immigration law, nationality law and international family law
www.altea.be
+32 2 894 45 70