The Lille administrative court on Friday rejected the request for injunctions filed by the CGT challenging the legality of the prefecture’s requisition of striking personnel from the TotalEnergies warehouse in Mardyck, near Dunkirk (North).
On Friday morning, another administrative court, that of Rouen, had already rejected a CGT appeal challenging the prefecture’s orders to requisition strikers, this time at the Esso-ExxonMobil refinery depot in Gravenchon, the only another site subject to a requisition in France.
In Lille, the administrative court ruled that “by establishing a service intended to guarantee, through a limited but sufficient number of employees, the only shipment of fuel, the prefect of the North did not attribute to the right to strike a serious and manifestly illegal interference”.
Given the magnitude of the supply problems in Hauts-de-France, “only the requisition is, in this case, sufficient, in an emergency, to prevent the risk of a total shortage of fuel for cars”, the court states in His writing. decision, consulted by AFP.
“An extremely political decision”
“We are facing an extremely political decision,” protested the CGT lawyer from the Flanders warehouse in Mardyck, Elsa Marcel. “Legally, it is serious that there may be requisitions that the government assumes are aimed at ending the conflict,” she added.
During the hearing, the CGT lawyers, Elsa Marcel and Elsa Galaup, had accused the prefect of responding to “precautionary measures” without having previously sought all the alternatives to the requisition of personnel.
The Flanders depot, on strike since September 27, “supplies at least half of the Hauts-de-France region, that is, at least half of the 6 million inhabitants who today experience supply difficulties of fuel”, had pointed out the prefect of the North George-François Leclerc, present at the hearing. He said the current crisis was putting “vulnerable people at risk” and hampering sectors of the regional economy.
In order to put an end to “disturbances of public order”, it had indicated that it had first put in place “measures to safeguard certain essential professions”, through priority access to certain stations, but that due to the disorder at service stations, these measures they were “no longer operational”.
On Friday, striking TotalEnergies employees decided to continue their movement. On the other hand, the strike was lifted successively on Thursday and Friday at the only two refineries of the Esso-ExxonMobil group in France, in Fos-sur-Mer on Thursday and in Gravenchon in Normandy on Friday.
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Source: BFM TV
