France, under pressure from humanitarian organizations, repatriated on Tuesday 15 women and 32 children who were being held in prison camps in north-eastern Syria where Islamic extremists were being held.
“The minors were handed over to the services in charge of helping children and will be subject to medical and social control,” the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which carried out the operation, said in a statement. “The adults were handed over to the competent judicial authorities,” he added.
This is the third large-scale repatriation operation after those in July and October last year. France first repatriated 16 women and 35 minors and then 15 women and 40 children.
The women and children repatriated today, associated with members of the Islamic State, were in the Roj camp under Kurdish administration, located about 15 kilometers from the Iraqi and Turkish borders.
France was particularly affected by extremist attacks, especially in 2015, promoted by the Islamic State.
French authorities thanked “the local administration in northeastern Syria for their cooperation, which made the operation possible,” which came shortly after the UN Committee Against Torture condemned France for failing to repatriate French citizens. from the prison camps in north-eastern Syria.
The families of these women and children had asked the Committee to intervene in 2019, accusing France of violating articles 2 and 16 of the Convention against Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment by not allowing their return.
The French State, in its observations transmitted to the UN Committee and cited in last week’s decision, justified the repatriation policy on a case-by-case basis, stressing that the Convention did not oblige a country to protect its nationals in a territory that was not under their jurisdiction.
However, the Committee considered that if the French State “is not at the origin of the violations suffered” by the women and children in the camps, it “continues to have the obligation” to protect them “against serious violations of human rights, taking all necessary and possible measures”.
France had already been condemned in 2022 by the Committee on the Rights of the Child and later by the European Court of Human Rights for the same reasons.
The French women had voluntarily gone to territories controlled by Islamic extremist groups and were captured when Islamic State fell in 2019.
Source: TSF
