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Aid to migrants: final discharge for activist Cédric Herrou

2021-03-31T13:31:38.215Z


This decision recognizes the possibility of helping migrants in a selfless way for their stay and their movement but not for their ent


The Court of Cassation rejected this Wednesday an appeal from the general prosecutor's office of Lyon and thus made final the release of the activist Cédric Herrou.

He was prosecuted for having conveyed migrants from Italy and organized a reception camp in 2016 in the Alpes-Maritimes department.

For the 41-year-old farmer, this decision marks the culmination of a long procedure punctuated by three trials and a referral to the Constitutional Council.

The latter consecrated in 2018 the “principle of fraternity”.

"This decision puts an end to the relentlessness of the prosecution against Cédric Herrou and allows us to finally recognize definitively that he only helped others, and that in our Republic fraternity cannot be a crime ”, reacted his lawyer, Me Sabrina Goldman.

Having become a symbol of aid to migrants in France, the peasant from the Roya valley was fined in the first instance, then to four months in prison on appeal in 2017. On the occasion of a first passage in front of the Court of Cassation, he seized, with another activist, the Constitutional Council on the "offense of solidarity" of which they considered themselves victims.

This approach culminated in July 2018 in a historic decision of the “Sages” which enshrines “the freedom to help others, for humanitarian purposes, regardless of the regularity of their stay in the national territory”.

On the form, a very rare decision in terms of law

Subsequently, Parliament amended the law by now protecting from prosecution persons providing assistance for the "stay" and "movement" of migrants, but not for their "entry" into the territory, if it is provided "without". counterpart ”and“ for an exclusively humanitarian purpose ”.

In the fall of 2018, the Court of Cassation quashed Cédric Herrou's conviction and returned the case to Lyon, where he was released on May 13, 2020. The general prosecutor then appealed to the Supreme Court.

"After examining both the admissibility of the appeal and the procedural documents, the Court of Cassation notes that there is, in this case, no means likely to allow the admission of the appeal", considered the highest jurisdiction of the judiciary.

This decision of non-admission "is very rare" for "an appeal from a general prosecutor's office", reacted the lawyer at the Court of Cédric Herrou, Me Patrice Spinosi, who sees it as a "real snub".

"It is now definitively established in our law that no criminal prosecution can be brought against a person who has helped a migrant in an irregular situation when he acts disinterestedly, whether or not he belongs to a association or that he wants to claim his act ”.

Source: leparis

All life articles on 2021-03-31

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