For Julie Alix, Professor of Criminal Law at Paris-Nanterre University, this audience was a missed opportunity to redefine coaction, the unique scene of violence or the association of terrorist criminals.
Interview by
Law professor Julie Alix, who works on criminal law and criminal policy to the test of the fight against terrorism, frequently came to attend the trial of November 13. It returns to the questions posed by the verdict rendered on June 29.
to what extent the legal reasoning of the National Anti -terrorist Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT) on the coaction and the unique scene of attacks, which allowed the Court to condemn Salah Abdeslam to incompressible life, does it seem acceptable to you?
In French law, the co -author of an offense is the one who has fully committed the offense with another. Thus, the killers of each commando were co -authors of each other, on the same crime scene. According to the current law, Salah Abdeslam is therefore not co -author of the Bataclan attacks because he was not present on the scene, but he is an accomplice of these facts, in particular, because he participated in their preparation. As an accomplice of the assassination attempts on the police intervened in the Bataclan, he could also have been condemned to the same sentence.
However, the Court, on requisitions of the PNAT, considered that “the different targets must be regarded as a unique scene of attack”, which allowed it to conclude that “each of the terrorists present in Paris and Saint -Denis must be regarded as co -author of all the attacks committed on November 13, 2015, without distinction of the target assigned to each of them “.
We therefore mobilized this theory of the single scene of violence, built in the 1970s, to respond to the phenomenon of group violence and which allows to condemn the one who participates in a scene of violence, despite uncertainty As for the link between its effective participation and the result generated. However, the application of this theory in the context of November 13 is not at all of course, because no uncertainty exists concerning the participation of Salah Abdeslam in the Bataclan scene – it was not.
What struck me, as a lawyer, was the lack of effort to conceptualize this question. This trial could have been an opportunity to note that our right is not adapted to the imputation of mass crimes and that something new should be built. But neither the PNAT nor the Court offer an argument to rethink the unique scene of violence. In general, the law was very absent from this trial, it is very unfortunate, because legal reasoning is at the heart of the judge’s office.
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