Belgian authorities have opened an investigation into the 2025 arrest of Lois McLatchie Miller and “Billboard” Chris Elston, one year after the activists were detained while conducting interviews on the street.
Miller, a British citizen, and Elston, a Canadian, were in Brussels interviewing passersby about radical gender ideology in June. Miller was holding a sign that read “Children are never born in the wrong body” and Elston — known for debating people on the streets while wearing sandwich boards — held one reading “Children cannot consent to puberty blockers.”
When a threatening crowd began to form, Miller called the police. Four police vans and fourteen officers arrived on the scene, only to arrest and strip-search Miller and Elston, who were held in custody for four hours.
“Opening up a criminal investigation into what happened is a major development,” Miller said. “It’s clear by any measure that our right to free speech was violated when we were put in jail cells for speaking about puberty blockers.”
Belgian authorities have not yet disclosed the scope of the criminal investigation, leaving open the key question of whether the inquiry is focused on potential misconduct by the police officers involved in the arrests or the conduct of the campaigners themselves. Miller and Elston have spent the past year petitioning the government to offer an apology and financial settlement for what they call an unlawful detention.
The scope of Brussels’s criminal investigation could signal a shift in Europe’s approach to free speech, which American officials warn is under attack on the continent.
“Free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” Vice President JD Vance said last year. “I look to Brussels, where EU Commission commissars warned citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest: the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be ‘hateful content’. Or to this very country where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of ‘combating misogyny’ on the internet.”
The vice president added that he believes Europe will rise to the occasion, and expressed his confidence that Europe’s democracies “are substantially less brittle than many people apparently fear.”
“We should be able to speak freely about one of the greatest medical scandals in modern history,” Elston said. “Children are being maimed, chemically casterated, and sterilized for an ideology which teaches they were born wrong.”
Elston is no stranger to brushing up against foreign speech codes and hostile crowds. In 2023, he was assaulted during an event in Canada, an attack police did nothing to stop. The following year, he was put on trial in Australia simply for sharing a link on X.
Months after his arrest in Belgium, Elston launched a nonprofit dedicated to fighting “medical malpractice of child transition” and defending free speech worldwide.
“We’re formalizing a grassroots movement to educate, activate, and equip people to protect children,” Elston told The Daily Wire in an exclusive interview after the organization’s launch.“We will always endeavor to follow the law, while at the same time challenge abuses of authority.”
