Rove beetles (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae) are early-stage visitors to corpses, feeding on the fauna present in and on the corpse such as the eggs and larvae of flies. The rove beetle eggs are laid on the corpse and the emerging larvae can also be predatory. The duration of the development from the egg to the adult stage is specific for each species of rove beetle and can be used in forensics to estimate the post-mortem interval (PMI), i.e. the elapsed time between death and the moment of discovery. In addition, inferences about the potential displacement of the corpse or the manner and cause of death can also be made. Therefore, correct identification of all life stages is important for forensic investigators, allowing them to make a precise estimation of the PMI. Nevertheless, rearing the early life stages, which are morphologically uniform and indistinguishable, into adults is a risky and time consuming task. Several authors have already demonstrated that the species identification process can be enhanced using DNA barcodes, provided that an elaborate reference library is available. At present, however, forensically important species of Western Europe are not or only sparingly represented in public gene libraries (e.g. Genbank and BOLD). To alleviate this existing knowledge gap, the present project aims at constructing a Belgian reference library based on 134 morphologically identified specimens representing 48 species of rove beetles know to be often found on corpses. We focused on the DNA barcode 5' region of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I gene (COI), the fragment internationally adopted as universal barcode fragment for animal identifications. Because the extracted DNA was fragmented due to the age of the samples, previously described internal primers were used to amplify smaller overlapping fragments. The sequences were aligned and consensus sequences were generated from these amplicons (388 bp and 403 bp long) for each species. The newly constructed library will be deposited in BOLD and in the forthcoming months its application will be evaluated by examining its capacity to identify unknown samples previously collected by the NICC in forensic cases.