Among all the immediate appearances of those detained during the demonstration against the pension reform last Thursday, the case of Camille denounced by The world is particularly notable. Tried before the Paris Court on Monday, March 27, this young bookseller was accused of “participation in a group for the preparation of violence or degradation” for having allegedly thrown projectiles at the police. The study of the videos from the surveillance cameras did not allow him to be incriminated for these events.
But the court also accused her of having refused, while she was at the police station, to give her fingerprints and the code of her telephone. A very framed obligation, which sometimes divides lawyers.
“Secret Convention”
Article 434-15-2 of the criminal code establishes that refusing to communicate the unlock code of your phone may constitute a crime, punishable by three years in prison and a fine of 270,000 euros. The case is identical in case of blocking by biometric means (fingerprints or facial recognition).
However, the delivery of the unlock code is subject to several criteria. “First of all, the policeman must make sure that the phone has a secret decryption convention,” explains Maître Julien Brochot, a lawyer at the Paris bar association.
Specifically, the police must thus demonstrate that it is impossible to exfiltrate exploitable and non-encrypted data, without unlocking the mobile. This is the case with the vast majority of mobile phones: iOS and Android encrypt a large part of the data, as soon as the user sets a lock code or a fingerprint/facial print. The mere presence of an encrypted application, such as WhatsApp, would also be enough to establish that certain data is encrypted.
In the context of a case in which a drug trafficker was implicated for refusing to transmit the code of two of his smartphones, a judgment of the Court of Cassation of November 7, 2022 ruled that the telephone code constituted a convention secret.
“Preparation of the crime or lack”
But Maître Julien Brochot mentions a second condition: “It is likely that the encryption of the smartphone has made it possible to prepare, facilitate or commit a crime or an offence.”
In Camille’s case, he was originally charged with police violence, on an individual basis. However, “until proven otherwise, we do not attack or hit a police officer with numerical data,” the lawyer believes. It would be different when we are talking about violence in a meeting with several people, and that the telephone exchanges could have done it. possibility of uniting to commit violence.
In a review written for the magazine AJ Criminal In November 2022, the gendarmerie officer and doctoral student in law Matthieu Audibert pointed out other obligations to impose the unlocking of the mobile. In the first place, the writing of a requisition report, then the fact of communicating the fact that a refusal can be classified as an infraction.
In addition, the Court of Cassation considers that the analysis of a telephone is similar to a registry, therefore it does not require the presence of a lawyer, but on the other hand it imposes a contradictory procedure: the data extraction must be done in the presence of the owner of the device.
For her part, Camille considered that it was “a serious attack on [sa] privacy, especially in a situation where [elle] No[t] she did nothing”. She was finally released due to a defect in the form of the arrest report. The prosecutor having been informed late of the placement in police custody, it was canceled by her lawyer. The Parisian student will have spent two days in police custody. and two others in pretrial detention at the Fleury-Mérogis prison.
Source: BFM TV
