811.114 Belgium/256
The Belgian Embassy to the Department of State
No. 2129
Note Verbale
The King’s Embassy advised its Government of the keen desire of His Excellency the Secretary of State to see Belgium collaborate on its territory in the fight against the smuggling of alcohol.
The Government of the United States desired that vessels leaving a Belgian port and carrying a cargo of alcohol should be required to give the authorities a bond which would not be returned except upon the exhibition of a certificate attesting to the unloading of the cargo at the declared destination.
Unfortunately, besides the arguments it has used in the past against the establishment of such a system, the King’s Government finds itself obliged to state that Belgian laws do not permit the imposition of the system of the certificate of unloading on vessels leaving the ports of the Kingdom. According to the law, the captains of vessels leaving Belgian ports are relieved of any further obligation to the customhouse, from the moment they prove, in the view of the export bureau and in the usual form, that they have regularly complied with all the formalities required.
If the King’s Government finds it impossible for it to accede to the proposals of the American Government in their present form, it nevertheless desires seriously to contribute to the solution of the problem and has sought for means to attain the object contemplated without violating the laws in force.
The Embassy takes the liberty, firstly, to recall that the Belgian Administration of the Marine, upon the request of the Ambassador of the United States at Brussels, had a very severe supervision exercised by the maritime inspection service, particularly on board the Norwegian vessel Bodo,9 suspected of coming to Antwerp to be loaded with alcohol for fraudulent introduction into the United States.
[Page 412]This step seems to have given certain results, by arousing the fears of the vessels engaged in smuggling, which, as the Department of State has acknowledged, have refrained from further attempts since the beginning of 1936.
The King’s Government will not fail to act in the same way in the future in like cases, and will always be happy to cooperate with the Ambassador of the United States at Brussels in this matter.
Furthermore, the Belgian Government finds itself in the position of giving even more effective aid to the American Government in an order of ideas such as that which gave rise to the initiatives taken by Norway.
It would be a matter of applying under these circumstances to the benefit of the United States the clauses of article 10 of the Belgian law of September 20, 1903, permitting the recall of the Belgian papers (lettres de mer) from a captain who should make illicit use of them. In other terms, a Belgian ship owner who might engage in fraudulent operations would see a more formidable threat hanging over him than that resulting from the possible confiscation of a bond.
The Belgian Administration of the Marine has, moreover, recalled the papers (lettres de mer) of a Belgian vessel whose irregular operations in its territorial waters had been indicated by a foreign government.
The King’s Government hopes that the American Government will appreciate the situation henceforth in its true light and that it will deem that in applying the above indicated measures Belgium is cooperating, as far as it is possible for it to do so, in the fight undertaken by the United States against alcohol smuggling.
- File translation revised by the editors.↩
- See telegram No. 94, November 29, 1935, 7 p.m., from the Ambassador in Belgium, Foreign Relations, 1935, vol. i, p. 443.↩