Two Dutch-speaking candidates for a seat on the Constitutional Court

The Senate presented, during its session on October 13, 2026, a double list of two candidates for the vacancy of a Dutch-speaking judge at the Constitutional Court. This presentation is the subject of an official notice from the FPS Prime Minister’s Chancellery published in the Belgian Official Gazette (Moniteur belge) No. 240 of October 21, 2026, under reference 2026/202759, page 56865. The notice is included in the table of contents of the same issue, on page 56731, under the section for federal official notices.

Two profiles, one single seat

The list contains two names for a single position to be filled, in the following order:

• First candidate: Mr. Wouter Pas, chamber president at the Council of State;
• Second candidate: Jan Theunis, law clerk at the Constitutional Court and professor at the Faculty of Law of Hasselt University.

Both men already hold high-level judicial positions: one at the top of the administrative jurisdiction, the other within the constitutional jurisdiction itself, where he holds the position of law clerk. The second candidate combines this role with an academic mandate in Hasselt, a detail expressly mentioned in the notice.

The legal basis of the presentation

The notice specifies that the vacancy must be filled on the basis of Article 34, § 1, 1°, of the Special Act of January 6, 1989, on the Constitutional Court. It is this same article that organizes the presentation of a double list by the Senate for the seats of Dutch-speaking judges.

The published text is bilingual, Dutch and French, in accordance with the practice of the Belgian Official Gazette for federal notices. The Dutch version speaks of “voordracht door de Senaat van een lijst van twee kandidaten voor het ambt van Nederlandstalig rechter in het Grondwettelijk Hof”; the French version of “présentation par le Sénat d’une liste double de candidats pour la fonction de juge d’expression néerlandaise à la Cour constitutionnelle”.

A laconic notice, without a timetable

The notice is limited to noting the presentation of the list and identifying the two candidates along with their positions. It indicates neither the date on which the vacancy opened, nor the name of the outgoing judge, nor the timetable for the remainder of the procedure.

No justification for the Senate’s choice is reproduced, nor the details of the votes or the composition of the commission that examined the candidacies. The official document therefore contains only the act of presentation, leaving the formalization of the appointment to a subsequent act.

Scope of the publication

Publication in the Belgian Official Gazette gives the Senate’s presentation its official and opposable form. It marks the culmination of the political selection phase and clears the way for the actual filling of the Dutch-speaking seat.

For litigants and practitioners, the stakes are direct: the linguistic composition of the Constitutional Court determines the handling of cases and the balance between Dutch-speaking and French-speaking roles within the institution. Any modification to this composition impacts constitutional jurisprudence, particularly in disputes relating to the powers of the federated entities.

The appointment itself will be the subject of a separate publication in the Belgian Official Gazette. It is this act that should be monitored to learn the name of the judge actually appointed between Wouter Pas and Jan Theunis, and the date on which they will take office.

Official source: Belgian Official Gazette No. 240 of October 21, 2026, notice 2026/202759, p. 56865.