Malian musician Rokia Traore arrested in rome Last June's trial over an international child custody dispute will be extradited to Belgium in the coming days after Italy's highest court rejected her appeal, her lawyer announced on Wednesday.
Traore, 50, who is also a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), was arrested at Rome's Fiumicino Airport on June 20 on a European arrest warrant. She was previously sentenced to two years in prison in October 2023 in Belgium in connection with the custody of her daughter. A Belgian court ordered her to hand over her nine-year-old daughter to her Belgian father, Jan Goossens.
“Rokia was treated unfairly. She was arrested without making her voice heard in Belgian criminal courts. Now the fight for Rokia's rights has moved to Brussels,” said lawyer Maddalena del Re. he said in a statement to Reuters.
Since her arrest in Italy, she has been held in a prison near the Italian capital and was flown to perform a concert in front of the Colosseum in Rome.
Del Re said the Belgian legal process was inconsistent with Italian constitutional doctrine and international conventions because the verdict was handed down in the defendant's absence.
The singer was first detained in France on a Belgian arrest warrant after stepping off a plane in Paris in 2020.
“Despite the fact that I live in Mali, I have always complied with the Belgian justice system,” she said at the time, explaining that she was visiting Europe to attend a custody hearing.
She was released on certain conditions and then took a private plane to Mali, where her daughter lives, ignoring instructions not to leave France until extradition procedures to Belgium were completed.
Traoré, the daughter of a Malian diplomat, is a celebrity in the country, best known in the West as an accomplished musician. As a singer-songwriter, she has pioneered an adventurous fusion of African and Western styles. She collaborated with American theater director Peter Sellers and won France's major music award, Victoire de la Musique. In 2019, he was guest director of the Brighton Festival.
