France closes the process against Cédric Herrou, a farmer who has been defying immigration laws for years

The farmer Cédric Herrou, in a file image.Eric Gaillard

"Solidarity will no longer be a crime."

With this message, the pro-immigration activist Cédric Herrou, considered a symbol of the fight for the rights of the undocumented in France, celebrated the decision of the French Supreme Court to reject an appeal against him from the Lyon Prosecutor's Office.

In this way, a definitive end to a long judicial process against this farmer from the Roya Valley, between Italy and France, is put, who has been defying the immigration laws of the French Government for years by helping undocumented immigrants who cross this European border and who He already obtained, in 2018, a fundamental victory when he managed to establish “fraternity” as a principle with constitutional value in his country.

"This decision puts an end to the fierceness of the Prosecutor's Office against Cédric Herrou and allows finally to recognize, in a definitive way, that he did nothing more than help others and that in our Republic, fraternity is not a crime," he said when he learned The decision was one of Herrou's lawyers, Sabrina Goldman, according to Agence France Presse.

The road has not been easy.

As the activist himself recalled on social networks, despite the fact that the Constitutional Council ruled in his favor in 2018, until his final acquittal he has had to endure "11 provisional arrests, five searches, five trials and five years of struggle."

Herrou, 41, clashes with justice began when he was sued for having transferred in 2016 almost 200 migrants, mostly Eritreans and Sudanese, from the Italian border to Saint-Dalmas-de-Tende, 16 kilometers from his village in the Roya Valley, where he organized a host camp in an old abandoned holiday village.

A year later, he was sentenced for this to a fine first and, after appealing, to four months in jail, a decision that he challenged again in court.

At the same time, he went to the Constitutional Council, the body in charge of controlling the constitutionality of the laws, before which he claimed to be a victim of a "crime of solidarity" that, although formally does not exist, he argued that it was applied against those who, like him , transport or house foreigners in an irregular situation.

In the summer of 2018, in France the official discourse in favor of restricting irregular immigration continued, Paris and other capitals accused each other of the arrivals at their ports of ships chartered by NGOs with hundreds of rescued migrants, and the judicial battle of Herrou.

But then, the Constitutional Council turned the migration battle upside down.

The “wise men”, as the members of this organization are known, agreed with the farmer and the activists who act like him in favor of homeless immigrants by enshrining the “principle of fraternity” as a constitutional value from which it “emerges”, They stressed, "the freedom to help others, with a humanitarian objective, regardless of the regularity of their stay in the national territory."

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As a result, that same year the French immigration law was modified, from which penalties were eliminated - until then of 30,000 euros or even five years in prison - for those who help immigrants during their "stay" in France or those who to help them “circulate” within the country, provided it is for “exclusively humanitarian” reasons and “without compensation”.

What is still punishable is helping immigrants in an irregular situation “enter” into France.

Two months later, the Supreme Court annulled Herrou's conviction and returned the case to the Lyon court, which acquitted him on May 13, 2020. However, the Prosecutor's Office decided to appeal to the Supreme Court, which this Wednesday has definitively shelved the case by rejecting this last resort.

"It is definitely consolidated in our law that no criminal proceeding can be carried out against a person for the fact that he has helped a migrant in an irregular situation if he acts disinterestedly, whether or not he belongs to an association", celebrated another of the lawyers of Herrou, Patrice Spinosi.