The controversial "conditional release" ruling for Michelle Martin comes 16 years into her 30-year sentence.
The court rejected two appeals, lodged by some of the families of the victims and prosecutors.
Martin is now set to move to a convent in southern Belgium, to the anger of relatives of the pair's victims.
Martin was arrested in 1996 and was finally convicted in 2004 of complicity in the starvation deaths of two girls kidnapped by Dutroux and of helping him in the abduction of a number of others.
Martin did not feed two eight-year-olds who were left in Dutroux's basement dungeon while he served a three-month jail term for an unrelated offence.
Dutroux himself is serving a life sentence for the kidnap and rape of six young and teenage girls. As well as the two whom Martin starved to death, Dutroux killed two others.
Judges at the federal Court of Cassation in Brussels rejected the two appeals against Martin's conditional release - one led by the father of one of the victims and another by prosecutors.
Martin is now expected to move to the Clarisse convent in Malonne near Namur in southern Belgium, where nuns have agreed to take her in.
She will be free to come and go as she pleases, but under the supervision of nuns and probation workers.
She has been ordered to "keep her distance" from relatives of the victims and will not be allowed to speak to the media about her crimes.
The case generates huge anger in Belgium, says the BBC's Matthew Price in Brussels.
It is not only the vicious nature of the crimes, but the incompetence some say characterised the police investigation.
Both Dutroux and Martin were jailed in the 1980s for kidnapping and raping five young girls, but were freed early on good behaviour - only to go on to abduct more young victims.
It was unclear when Martin will go to Malonne, where she will, in the words of her lawyer, seek atonement for her crimes.
But security forces there are reportedly already preparing for her arrival.
In 10 years' time she will be eligible for full release into the community, according to an earlier court ruling.
No comments:
Post a Comment