Why did a Liège court impose a one-year prison term for selling two heroin wraps?

The Liège

Lugar

Liège

Walloon city where the transaction occurred and where the case was judged.

Por qué es importante

Walloon city where the transaction occurred and where the case was judged.

About

Liège is a city and municipality in the Belgian region of Wallonia, and the capital of the eponymous province. The city is situated in the valley of the Meuse, in the east of Belgium, not far from borders with the Netherlands and Germany. In Liège, the Meuse meets the river Ourthe. The city is part of the sillon industriel, the former industrial backbone of Wallonia. It is still the principal economic and cultural centre of the region.

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For people in Liège, the case matters because it sits directly on the fault line between public safety, overloaded criminal justice and addiction care. Federal law prohibits the sale and possession of heroin, while the Belgian Federal Public Service Justice says magistrates can also direct people with problematic drug use towards assistance at every stage of criminal proceedings. The sentence therefore should not be read as establishing that every similarly small transaction attracts a year in prison: Belgian courts determine punishment from the legal classification, record and individual circumstances of each defendant.

The underlying incident was reported much earlier. According to Liège broadcaster QU4TRE, police intercepted a 36-year-old Liège resident at about 11:00 on 13 December 2014 after seeing him sell two heroin wraps on Rue de la Régence. The broadcaster, citing the Liège prosecutor’s office, reported that he admitted the transaction and said he needed money. That contemporary report described previous convictions but no earlier drug conviction. La DH’s 2026 description of him as a repeat offender may therefore refer to his broader record or later convictions; the public material reviewed for this article does not resolve that point.

The twelve-year distance between the reported offence and the published sentence is also unexplained. The available reports do not say whether there were intervening proceedings, an absence, procedural delays or a later appeal-stage decision. That gap is important: without the written judgment, it would be unsafe to infer either that an ordinary case took twelve uninterrupted years or that the new Belgian Criminal Code determined the outcome.

Liège’s response to opioid use is wider than courtroom punishment. With the backing of Mayor Willy Demeyer, the city opened Såf Ti, Belgium’s first supervised drug-consumption room, in 2018. Wallonia’s historical portal says the facility, operated with the addiction-service expertise of Centre Alfa, was designed for people accustomed to using heroin or cocaine in public. Federal legislation adopted in 2023 subsequently protected staff at authorised consumption rooms from prosecution merely for facilitating drug use within that framework.

That produces two legitimate but different institutional perspectives. The criminal-court perspective treats the transfer of heroin in a public street as unlawful supply, even when the seller is himself dependent and the quantity is limited. The public-health perspective, represented locally by the City of Liège, Centre Alfa and the federally funded Rev-DRoom researchers, treats high-risk users as people who also require supervised access, healthcare and routes into treatment. Belgium’s Federal Justice service explicitly describes national policy as “integrated”, combining enforcement with the possibility of referral to assistance.

The European picture supports that broader reading without diminishing the offence. The European Union Drugs Agency says heroin remains Europe’s most commonly used illicit opioid and contributes substantially to drug-related harm. Its 2025 report found opioids present in seven out of ten fatal overdoses for which toxicology was available across 19 EU countries. EUDA also listed supervised facilities in both Liège and Brussels, meaning Brussels the Belgian city in this service context, not simply the seat of EU institutions.

The immediate next step is procedural: confirmation is needed on whether the conviction is final, how the court justified the custodial term, and whether treatment formed any part of the sentence or its execution. More broadly, the case leaves Liège with the same difficult task it has pursued since 2018—protecting public space while recognising that small-scale street dealing by a dependent person can be both a crime and a symptom of entrenched illness and poverty.