On Sunday morning, 23 November 2025, I stood as a speaker before the International Criminal Court in The Hague, in my capacity as president of the fundamental rights organization Postversa vzw. Behind me rose the building that symbolizes something we would rather not face: the capacity of human beings to turn other human beings into objects. For many who walked by, it may have been just an ordinary Sunday morning. For me, it felt like a moment of reckoning: do we still mean what we have been so eager to repeat since Nuremberg – “never again” – or has it become a phrase reserved for commemorative ceremonies?
We took in everything around us, but nothing at the core of our story was fake. The story we brought is about real patterns, and the people around me were not props. They were conscious citizens and influencers speaking to their own audiences, wanting to bring this theme to a broad public. Not just extras, but people who link their name and face to a warning.
The movement depicted in the scene – a Muslim brotherhood that uses religion as a lever for power – is not a literal copy of a single organization, but a sharp portrayal of something we have seen more often. Time and again, an ideology emerges that says: “We know the truth, we speak in the name of God, we decide who belongs and who does not.” The packaging changes – religious, nationalist, identitarian – but the core remains the same: people are reduced to pawns in the service of a project that claims to be greater than they are.
That pattern is not a theory. It has faces and burial grounds. The trenches of the First World War, the Nuremberg trials, the testimonies from Rwanda and Srebrenica, the case files in this court: each time there was a preceding period in which words slowly hardened. Neighbours first became “different”, then a “problem”, then an “enemy”. Only much later did we coin terms like “genocide” and “crime against humanity”. Language lagged behind events. By then, the dead no longer had a voice.
Precisely for that reason, we did not want to film this scene in some anonymous setting, but in front of the International Criminal Court. Not because I believe that cinema or opinion pieces will save the world, but because I am convinced that we must constantly repeat the minimum standards of our society. That is uncomfortable work. It requires us to acknowledge how tempting the promise of apparent clarity is: “Give us your freedom, and we will give you safety in return.” In my speech, I tried to call that temptation by its name.
My concern is not a faith community. On the contrary: the millions of Muslims who work, study, love and pray for peace every day are not a target, but allies. What is at stake is the organized manipulation of conviction. The moment an organization says: “We speak in the name of God, we decide who is pure and who is not, we determine who has a right to freedom,” something fundamental shifts. Faith then ceases to be the intimate space of the conscience and becomes an instrument to steer people.
Today, this rarely happens in uniform. History has done its work; overt marches with flags have lost some of their appeal. In their place, we see networks, NGOs, schools, digital structures that seemingly focus on education, aid or identity. The words sound gentle: “protection”, “morality”, “honour”. But beneath those words, another agenda may be hiding: restricting the equality of women, putting education at the service of a single doctrine, prying young people loose from their own critical capacity.
Some will say: “It is just a gathering.” But here it was exactly the other way around: we used this gathering as a means to express a real concern, with real people lending their voices and their reach. That is precisely why the setting of The Hague is important. This court is not an abstract symbol. It was built because there were moments when states, armies, militias and leaders crossed a line. That line did not suddenly appear. It was preceded by a long period of hesitation, of looking away, of “it will probably not be that bad”. The road to the courtroom is paved with moments when citizens, media and politicians could have said: “This far and no further.”
In my speech I tried to make that “this far” concrete. When a movement relegates women to the second row, that is not an internal affair, but an attack on the equality of human beings. When education is narrowed down to indoctrination, that is not a cultural choice, but the silencing of the next generation. When doubt is equated with betrayal, that is not religious zeal, but an attack on the conscience.
What can we, as ordinary citizens, set against this? Certainly not a fetish of neutrality. The slogan “I do not meddle in politics or religion” sounds modest, but becomes dangerous once it means that we outsource our moral intuition to those who shout the loudest. The lesson from Nuremberg to The Hague is not that only states and generals are responsible. The lesson is that each of us has a minimal duty to refuse the narrative of “us versus them”.
In The Hague, I tried to capture that duty in two sentences: faith is sacred, but the conscience of the human being is not for sale. That applies to every religion, but just as much to secular ideologies. As soon as a movement – whatever label it gives itself – places its own doctrine above human dignity, it becomes a danger. Not because it thinks differently, but because it uses other people’s freedom as bargaining chips.
The action we carried out on 23 November 2025 in front of the International Criminal Court will perhaps, for some, be just a credit line at the end. What will hopefully linger is the question to the viewer – and to ourselves: what do we do when an organization, in the name of God, the nation or the group, asks us to surrender our conscience? Do we nod, because it is comfortable? Or do we stand up, even if that only means that we dare to say “not in our name” in our own environment?
That day, I chose to say it out loud, with the International Criminal Court as witness in the background, together with people, extras of this time and influencers who use their reach to carry this message further. Not because I consider myself important, but because silence in such matters is a luxury we can no longer afford.
Andy Vermaut +32499357495