A former Burundian Minister of Justice and his wife were sentenced Friday March 26 to two years in prison suspended by the Court of Appeal of Versailles for having exploited a compatriot for several years at their home in the Paris region.
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This judgment confirms the sentence pronounced at first instance and resumes the requisitions of the prosecution.
The Court of Appeal recognized the Mpozagara couple, who were not present at the hearing, guilty of "human trafficking", "covert work" and "assistance with irregular entry and stay".
Their lawyer did not wish to speak.
Last February, Method S., a Burundian farmer, explained to the audience how he had been "
forced
" to "
work in fear
" for ten years in the house of the couple, who had confiscated his passport.
Cleaning, ironing, gardening, he got all the chores ... "
If I didn't do it, they wouldn't give me food,
" he argued.
In 2018, warned by a shopkeeper, the police had discovered in the villa of the former minister and former diplomat of Unesco Gabriel Mpozagara in Ville-d'Avray (Hauts-de-Seine) a man "
emaciated and obviously scared
”in the basement, in an unsanitary room.
The Versailles Court of Appeal also ordered the Mpozagara spouses to pay damages to Method S. in the amount of 50,000 euros for injury to dignity and 20,000 euros for emotional damage, the father not being able to seeing his wife and children for years.
A procedure initiated before the industrial tribunal
A procedure aiming to claim the wages owed is initiated in parallel before the industrial tribunal, no employment contract or any tangible trace of remuneration having been established.
The court's decision "
confirms that there is no impunity
" for trafficking in human beings, "
whatever the function and the stature of the defendants
", welcomed the plaintiff's lawyer, Me Alexandre. Reynaud.
The Mpozagara couple had already been convicted in 2007 in France but released on appeal in a similar case which concerned two nieces from Burundi.
The latter then pleaded their case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which condemned France in October 2012 for having failed in its fight against forced labor.
In 2013, the French Parliament introduced forced labor, reduction into servitude and reduction into slavery into the penal code.
