Is France violating the human rights of its citizens by not repatriating women and children of jihadists to Syria?
The question will be submitted on Wednesday 29 September to the judges of the Grand Chamber, the most important formation of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
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Judicial body of the Council of Europe, based in Strasbourg, the ECHR will examine at 9.15 a.m. two applications lodged in May 2019 and October 2020 by the parents of French women who left with their companions in Syria where they had children and who are now detained in refugee camps in northeastern Syria. These camps bring together members of jihadist families and are administered by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), led by the Kurds.
The four parents of these two women, designated only by their initials, have asked the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the repatriation to France of their daughters and grandchildren.
In both cases, the summary judge of the administrative court rejected their requests and the appeals before the Council of State, the highest administrative court in France, were rejected in April 2019 and September 2020. Since the fall of the State organization Islamic in 2019, Paris repatriated around thirty children on a case-by-case basis, mostly orphans, but believes, on the other hand, that adults, accused of complicity with the ultra-radical organization, should be tried on the spot.
Inhuman treatments?
Seized against a State when all national remedies have been exhausted, the ECHR judges compliance by 47 States on the European continent with the European Convention on Human Rights.
In this case, the 17 judges of the Grand Chamber, including the President of the ECHR, the Icelandic Robert Spano, will have to determine whether France has violated Article 3 of the convention which prohibits inhuman or degrading treatment.
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The applicants also allege that these repatriation refusals are contrary to an article stating that "no one may be deprived of the right of entry into the territory of the State of which he is a national". In the first case, the applicants' daughter, born in 1991, left France in 2014 to reach Syrian territory controlled by ISIS with her companion, who died in February 2018. They had two children born in Syria in 2014. and 2016. The woman and her children were reportedly arrested in February 2019 and have since been in Al-Hol camp (northeastern Syria), explains the ECHR.
In the second, very similar case, the applicants' daughter left in July 2015 for Iraq and then for Syria, where she gave birth to a child in January 2019. She was detained with her baby in the Al camp. -Hol from March 2019, then in the Roj camp, also controlled by the Kurds.
"The father would have been imprisoned in a Kurdish prison", continues the court.
The NGO Save the Children deplored Thursday the death since early 2021 of 62 children in these two camps housing, in decried living conditions, tens of thousands of displaced people, including some 40,000 children.
A later decision
After the hearing, the judges of the ECHR will retire to deliberate and render their decision in several months.
This will be final.
The hearing, public but with restricted access due to the health situation, will be filmed and the video will be posted on the ECHR website from 2:30 p.m.
If France is currently the only European state attacked before the ECHR on this issue, seven member states of the Council of Europe (Norway, Denmark, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Sweden) have asked to intervene in the proceedings, which has also been granted to several non-governmental organizations, such as the Defender of Rights or the British rights NGO Reprieve.