Who was Anne Thily, Belgium’s first female prosecutor-general?

Anne Thily, the first woman to serve as a prosecutor-general in Belgium and one of the most visible magistrates during the country’s judicial crises of the 1990s, died in Liège on 19 August 2026 at the age of 88. Her death was reported by Sudinfo and subsequently confirmed by several Belgian outlets and a published death notice. Thily led the public prosecutor’s office attached to the Liège Court of Appeal from 1996 until 2004, a period dominated by the investigations surrounding Marc Dutroux and the assassination of the Walloon politician André Cools.

Born in Hannut on 13 October 1937, Thily studied law at the University of Liège, briefly practised at the bar and entered the magistracy in 1970 as a deputy public prosecutor. She became an advocate-general in 1984 before reaching the top post in Liège in 1996. Reporting by Le Journal de Liège and Het Nieuwsblad identifies her appointment as a national first: no woman had previously headed a Belgian prosecutor-general’s office.

The distinction mattered in an institution whose senior ranks were still overwhelmingly male, but Thily’s public reputation was forged less by symbolism than by the cases that landed on her desk. She assumed office as the justice system was entering the most traumatic period in recent Belgian history. Marc Dutroux was arrested in August 1996; Sabine Dardenne and Laetitia Delhez were rescued, while investigators recovered the bodies of Julie Lejeune, Mélissa Russo, An Marchal and Eefje Lambrecks. RTBF’s historical account records that Julie and Mélissa were found on 17 August 1996 after almost fourteen months of fear and uncertainty for their families.

According to the reporting carried by Het Nieuwsblad, Thily was present when the parents of Julie and Mélissa were told that their daughters’ bodies had been found. That intensely human duty was followed by a much more public institutional one: explaining how police and judicial authorities had failed to connect information that might have led investigators to Dutroux earlier.

The federal parliament’s inquiry report shows that Thily produced one of the official assessments considered by MPs examining the handling of the disappearances. The commission was established amid evidence of poor coordination, fragmented files and serious dysfunction across police and judicial services. Thily consequently became both a representative of the institution under examination and one of the officials expected to account for its conduct.

That dual position explains the sharply different frames through which her record was viewed. Within the prosecution service, she was known as a forceful head of office who defended the independence of magistrates and insisted that confidential investigations be protected. Parliamentary investigators, victims’ relatives and a deeply distrustful public, by contrast, demanded direct answers about individual responsibility and the failures that had allowed Dutroux to remain at large. During a 1997 appearance before the parliamentary inquiry, Thily’s concern about leaks and her reluctance to discuss protected case material frustrated commission chairman Marc Verwilghen, then a Flemish liberal MP. The disagreement was substantive: Parliament prioritised public accountability, while Thily argued from the obligations of an active prosecution service.

Her tenure was also marked by the long investigation into the 1991 killing of André Cools, a former Deputy Prime Minister and leading figure in Walloon socialism. Belgian reports recall that Thily defended investigating judge Véronique Ancia when aspects of the inquiry were challenged. The Cools case placed the Liège judiciary under exceptional political and media pressure and reinforced Thily’s reputation as an uncompromising, sometimes difficult institutional voice.

She was not simply protective of her own organisation. Le Journal de Liège and the Belga report published by Het Nieuwsblad note that she sent two members of her own prosecutor-general’s office before a court in separate cases involving allegations including handling stolen property, fraud, corruption and breach of professional secrecy. Those proceedings contributed to the “iron lady” image attached to her, although the label can flatten a more complicated record: she could defend magistrates against external pressure while also acting against alleged misconduct inside her office.

A prosecutor-general is the highest-ranking public prosecutor attached to a court of appeal and also heads the prosecutor-general’s office for that jurisdiction. Belgium’s Courts and Tribunals service explains that the office supervises members of the public prosecution service and represents the prosecution at the appellate level and, where required, before an assize court. It is part of the federal judicial order. Neither the Walloon Region nor the French Community appoints or directs these magistrates, even when their territorial jurisdiction is centred on Liège.

Thily’s years in office coincided with a lasting reorganisation of Belgian justice. The Dutroux shock accelerated the integration of the police services, strengthened external scrutiny and put coordination among prosecutors on a more formal footing. Parliamentary records from 1996 place Thily among the prosecutors-general consulted as legislators developed the statutory College of Prosecutors-General, which coordinates criminal policy under the authority established by federal law. Her career therefore overlapped not only with institutional failure but with the attempt to rebuild the system that followed it.

That legacy remains politically relevant during the current federal legislative cycle, as the government and Parliament continue to confront court backlogs, staffing shortages and public confidence in justice. Thily held no current political office, and her death does not itself change policy. It does, however, remove one of the last senior judicial witnesses to the moment when Belgian justice was forced to explain itself in public on an unprecedented scale.

The immediate next steps are commemorative rather than institutional. Details of official tributes or participation by serving judicial authorities had not been comprehensively announced when this article was prepared. What endures is the tension that defined Thily’s public career: the prosecutor’s duty to protect investigations and judicial independence set against society’s equally legitimate demand to understand how its institutions failed. Her place as Belgium’s first female prosecutor-general is clear; the harder assessment of the Dutroux years remains part of the country’s unfinished judicial memory.