Singer/guitarist Traore to face jail 3 months after arrest in Rome
By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
Rokia Traore will be extradited from Italy to Belgium over an outstanding two-year prison sentence handed down in a child-custody dispute, her lawyer has announced.
The Malian singer and guitarist, one of the best known vocalists out of Africa, was sentenced in absentia by a Brussels court last year on charges of parental abduction.
She was arrested in Italy in June and challenged the extradition order.
But a Rome court ruled Thursday that “Rokia will have to be transferred to Belgium within 10 days from today,” lawyer Maddalena Claudia Del Re told AFP.
She had been arrested in Paris in March 2020 on a European arrest warrant over a Belgian court ruling ordering her to return her daughter, now aged nine, to the child’s Belgian father, Jan Goossens.
She defied a ban on leaving France and flew home to Mali several months later, before she could be sent to Belgium.
Goossens’s lawyer Sven Mary said Thursday her client hoped that “as soon as [Traore] arrives, he will be able to obtain constructive solutions for the well-being and in the interests of his little daughter”.
The child has “now been living for months without her parents, which can in no way be good for her”, Mary told AFP.
Goossens’s legal team had previously said he had not had any contact with his daughter, who lives in Mali, since she turned four.
He had offered to draw up a new custody agreement with Traore, validated by Malian and Belgian courts, to “find a way out of this nightmare and guarantee their child a future with two parents.”
Beyond her feted music career, Traore is also known for her advocacy work for refugees, and was made a UN ambassador for refugees in 2015.
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