The Toulouse Administrative Tribunal has enjoined, Monday, to the Minister of Health and the Prefect of Haute-Garonne, the completion of eleven urgent measures to improve the conditions of detention of this penitentiary establishment.
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Detention conditions “unworthy” due to “dramatically high overpopulation”. Nearly three months after the Comptroller General of Liberty Deprivation Places denounced an “unacceptable” situation at the Toulouse-Seyses stopping house – and at the request of the French Section of the International Observatory of Prisons and The Order of Lawyers at the Toulouse Bar -, the Toulouse Referral Judge ordered, Monday, October 4, the implementation of eleven urgent measures to respond to a situation that would never cease to degrade in this penitentiary establishment.
The court motivated these decisions in view of the “prison overpopulation that imposes on 173 detainees to sleep on mattresses on the floor, the absence of any intimacy of the sanitary areas”, or because of “many Facts of violence (about 150 between detainees each year) and endemic difficulties of access to care “.
On June 28, Dominique Simonnot, former journalist in chained duck and general controller of privacy places, spoke in his report of “some detainees who sleep with toilet paper in the ears, so that the cockroaches do not return inside “. A report, broadcast by France 2, confirms this information through images shot by detainees. Located 25 kilometers south of Toulouse, commissioned in 2003 with an original 695-seater capacity, the stop house comprises 482 places today.
At the time of check, the establishment accommodated 898 detainees, an occupancy rate of 186%. “The situation is similar in the district of the Women’s Stop House, which houses 58 people for a capacity of 40, an occupancy rate of 145%,” confirmed the court. The establishment is, moreover, “numerous harmful, while all the swing doors intended to ensure the intimacy of the detainees in the sanitary areas are broken”. Finally, 172 cells are occupied by three persons, an available space by detained of the order of 3.5 m².
Call possible to the state council
Reacting to these injunctions, M e Sébastien Delorge, the Bar of Toulouse, says “rather satisfied, even if all that had already been raised in the June report.” He emits, however, a few observations, like “the passage to two hours of walk a day instead of one after the CVIV-19 crisis, that the direction of Seyses still seems to have implemented”. The lawyer, like the International Observatory of Prisons, fears, however, that the custody of the seals, Eric-Dupond-Moretti, does not appeal the decision before the Council of State. “It has been the case in the past and it saves them time for nothing to move”, they point out. At the end of the hearing, neither the department nor the management of the establishment did not wish to react.
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