Repatriation of jihadist families: France defends its refusal before the European Court of Human Rights

It is an honor which the French government would have done well. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg examined, Wednesday, September 29, in its supreme formation, the Grand Chamber, the request of the families of two jihadist women detained in Syria with their children asking for their repatriation to the French state, which refuses to do so for the moment. It is true that when the seventeen judges of the ECHR, accompanied by their four deputies, enter the ovoid room intended for these hearings, there is something to be impressed with.

This hearing was the culmination of a long race after the successive refusals of the administrative court and then the Council of State to rule on this which they consider to be a “prerogative” of the executive. Behind the two requests, the parents of two young women aged 30 and 32, who arrived in Syria in 2014 and 2015, when the Islamic State (IS) organization was at the height of its power and ruled over a “caliphate” on horseback. Syria and Iraq. Since then, they have given birth to several children and found themselves trapped in Baghouz, the last stronghold of ISIS, in early 2019.

Locked up in the gigantic Al-Hol camp (60,000 people), in the northeastern Syria, then in that of Roj, reserved for European prisoners and their children, they are in the custody of Kurdish forces, allies of the West in the war against ISIS, which administer the territory. Beyond their case, it is the fate of hundreds of European women and children – including a hundred French women and two hundred children – which is at stake.

” We are waiting for the Court to condemn France because we consider that it exposes these children and their mothers to inhuman and degrading treatment ” ^{by not proceeding with their repatriation, declared M} es Marie Dosé and Laurent Pettiti, lawyers for both families, before the hearing . According to them, “these children are victims of war, and their mothers must answer for their acts before the only country where they are prosecuted: France ”^{. Lawyers also believe Paris responsible for a violation of the right to family life. Finally, they underline that the European Convention on Human Rights, to which France is a signatory, prohibits a State from preventing the return to its territory of its nationals.}

The “case by case policy”

The audience, in the presence of several families of French prisoners and of the deputy Pierre Morel-A-L’Huissier (UDI, Corrèze), began with the presentation of the arguments of the French government, presented by the legal director of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, François Alabrune. For him,

“France has no jurisdiction” on the territory where French women and their children are detained. In other words, these French women depend either on the Kurdish autonomous authorities – which are not internationally recognized – or on the Syrian regime, with which Paris severed diplomatic relations in 2012.

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