The summary judge of the administrative court rejected, this Saturday, a request filed by Amnesty International which wanted to urgently obtain the suspension of French arms deliveries to Israel. The judge declared himself incompetent and therefore dismissed the applicants' case.
He considered that this file was not "detachable from the conduct of France's international relations", thus agreeing with the argument developed during a brief hearing, this Saturday morning, by the government representative, Antoine Pavageau.
The French section of Amnesty took legal action this week, alongside the Human Rights League, to try to force the government to suspend export licenses to Israel for certain war materials, until that the Jewish State “complies with its international obligations”.
The argument of a “catastrophic humanitarian situation”
More precisely, this procedure concerned export licenses for military equipment of categories ML5 which allows artillery to determine targets and ML15 used for imaging and radars.
During the hearing, Amnesty International's lawyer, Maître Lionel Crusoe, highlighted the “catastrophic humanitarian situation” in Gaza and the recent position taken by the UN Human Rights Council, who demanded a halt to all arms sales to Israel.
“No one disputes the seriousness of the situation in the Middle East”, but France's position is “balanced” since it called for a ceasefire, replied the representative of the Minister of the Armed Forces, Vincent Droullé. France, he insisted, does not deliver weapons to Israel, but “components integrated into a weapons system with a purely defensive purpose”.
The court must still rule at the beginning of next week on two similar requests, filed by other associations. One comes from the NGO Action Sécurité Ethique Républicaines, with ACAT-France (Action of Christians for the Abolition of Torture), Stop Fueling War and Sherpa, and targets the export of ML3 category war materials ammunition and ammunition elements. The other was filed by a collective including Attac and France Palestine Solidarité and concerns all licenses for exporting war materials to Israel. “There is extreme opacity around the conditions in which France today intervenes and supplies weapons” to the Hebrew State, Master Vincent Brengarth, lawyer for this collective, denounced Thursday at a press conference.