The Paris Administrative Court annulled on Thursday, March 13, France’s negatives to repatriate 29 children of jihadists and their mothers, of French nationality and detained in Syria, and ordered the quai d’Osay to reexamine their situation within two months.
“This is a historic decision,” said AFP, the lawyer of relatives of French families selected in Syria. According to Marie Dosé, “France has postponed enough in this sad matter” and “these children must return home now.”
In 2024, the grandparents, members of the United Families Collective had submitted repatriation requests in France for 29 French children, arrested with their mothers in the Roj camp, in the Northeast of Syria. All these requests had been rejected by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
An “exceptional risk of children’s life”
An incomprehensible decision for the collective and for lawyers for families who had decided to seize the Administrative Court pointing out the vulnerability of these children, from six to fifteen years and some of whom were born in detention.
At the hearing in early February, the public rapporteur presented his analysis of the questions raised, he had shown that applicants ran, emphasizing “the exceptional risk of attacking the lives of minors.”
Contacted by AFP after the decision of the Administrative Court, the grandfather of three selected children in Roj expressed his relief for the announcement of the revision of the reexamal of the archive of his relatives in two months: “I hope that he materializes very quickly and that we do not stop there. We must close this shame and that we repathered all the children and their mothers.”
France carried out several repatriation operations that ceased in the summer of 2023 despite international convictions, including that of the European Human Rights Court in 2022. Paris has refused to go there, for the danger of operations.
At least 120 French children still detained in Syria
Several members of United Families Collective were there last August. They had noticed the living conditions rather than precarious of their loved ones who “do not receive care, suffer from malnutrition, do not go to school and live in a war zone,” I said in court.
“We saw our grandchildren that they were so happy to meet us,” recalls one of the grandparents. “We have seen that for them, we represent the future. We were those who could take them out of the camp,” he continues. According to collective figures, at least 120 French children and 50 women are still arrested in Syria. Mothers are attacked by an arrest warrant.
At the beginning of March, the Paris Administrative Court declared itself incompetent to ask France to reorganize the repatriation request of three French people who went to fight in Syria and imprisoned by the Kurdish forces.
In its judgments, the court estimated that its situation was not “exceptional circumstances.”
Since the fall of the Daesh organization six years ago, Quai d’Orsay believes that people accused of complicity with IS must be judged in the act.
Source: BFM TV
