The court of cassation ordered Wednesday the change of scenery in Paris of the legal proceedings initiated after a complaint filed in Fort-de-France against the prefect of Martinique Stanislas Cazelles following the publication in the spring of an anti-covid poster deemed racist, a we learned from a judicial source.
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The supreme court of the judicial order granted a request of the Attorney General to the Court of Appeal of Fort-de-France Pierre-Yves Colliau.
The magistrate had justified this request by
"the very tense situation that Martinique has known for about a year"
and by
"the close professional relations between the public prosecutor of Fort-de-France, more generally the courts, with the Martinique prefectural authority. ".
Links which would make according to him
"suspicious, in the name of objective impartiality, any judicial decision".
The prosecution of Prefect Cazelles follows the publication last May of a poster intended to promote physical distancing between people as part of health measures in order to fight against the coronavirus.
The image showed two figures, one black and one white, standing three feet apart, a distance symbolized by five pineapples.
Described as
"insulting and racist"
by environmental MEP Karima Delli and Jean-Luc Melenchon, it was quickly withdrawn and the prefect apologized.
A group of people posing as anti chlordecone (dangerous pesticide) activists had brought criminal proceedings for racial public insults against Stanislas Cazelles.
These same plaintiffs are being prosecuted for having violently demonstrated against a shopping center located in Robert (25km from Fort-de-France), belonging to the Hayot group, which they accuse of being responsible for the chlordecone pollution.
Serious clashes occurred on January 13 on the sidelines of their summons to court.
It is these
"excesses before the judicial court in particular on January 13"
which led the prosecution to demand the relocation of the file, explains the prosecutor.
Chlordecone is a pesticide used in banana plantations from 1972 to 1993 that infiltrated West Indian soils for hundreds of years and is suspected to be the cause of prostate cancer.
Associations in Martinique are calling for criminal proceedings to be taken against its importers.
The population is waiting for concrete answers on the progress of complaints from associations, and on the establishment of a new table of occupational diseases which would take into account the harmful effects of chlordecone on banana plantation workers.
It is this silence and the delays in this file by the health center that are causing this climate of tension in Fort-de-France.