According to the United Nations Committee against Torture, Paris is obliged to protect women and children of French nationality held in Syria. France has already been condemned twice for the same reason.
mo12345lemonde with AFP
By refusing to repatriate women and children of French nationality who are detained in Syrian camps, France breaks the convention against torture, judges the United Nations Committee responsible for ensuring its application.
Even if the French State “is not at the origin of the violations suffered, it still remains in the obligation” to protect these people “against serious human rights violations by taking all the necessary and possible measures “, estimates the committee against torture in a decision consulted on Saturday January 21 by the France-Presse agency. Do not take “effective measures” to protect them and not repatriate them “would constitute a violation (…) of the convention”.
The decision is not binding, but France is invited to transmit the decisions taken to the committee “to follow up [its] observations” in the eighty days.
“The United Nations Torture Committee confirms this: our country chooses to abandon children and their mothers in the war zone by being perfectly aware of the suffering they endure and the violence to which they are exposed “, Reacts in a press release Marie Dosé, lawyer for families of women and children selected in the northeast Syrian camps. “One hundred and fifty children and their mothers face a fifth winter” in these camps controlled by the Kurdish forces, she recalls.
The French State, in its observations transmitted to the UN Committee and cited in the decision rendered Thursday, notably considered that the Convention did not impose a country to protect its nationals in a territory which is not under its jurisdiction. In addition, France “does not in any way have the capacity to carry out repatriations” which do not depend “only (…) on the will of the government”, he says, evoking the responsibility of the local authorities and the mothers.
France has already been sentenced in 2022 by the Committee on the Rights of the Child and then by the European Court of Human Rights for the same reason. After years of treatment on a case -by -case basis, France carried out two repatriations of women and minors, in July and last October.
