Cédric Shaurli, a Frenchman from the Gers, has put his life on hold for 5 years to find his daughter Meriem, detained in Algeria by her mother.
But despite dozens of legal actions, several convictions of his ex-wife and a wanted notice from Interpol… Nothing works.
January 14, 2017 “was the day I saw Meriem for the last time.
She was a year and a half,” the 37-year-old former journalist told AFP, who has since stopped working and spends several months a year in Algeria in the hope of recovering his child.
But his "nightmare" began in December 2015. "We were on vacation in Algiers, and the day before our return to France, while I was taking a shower, my wife fled with our daughter", recalls painfully Cédric Shaurli, reached by phone.
Three weeks later, she asked for a divorce in Algeria, accusing her husband of "disbelief" and "turning our child away from Islam", says the father from Auch.
His ex-wife sentenced to 15 months in prison
The judgment will grant Cédric Shaurli the right to visit for a few hours a week, "which takes place in an atmosphere of threats and humiliation in the house of my ex-mother-in-law", according to him.
The Frenchman quickly comes up against refusals to exercise his right of access, he explains.
Until January 2017 when she let him know, by bailiff, that she was moving to the Sahara.
"But the address she gave does not exist," says the 30-year-old.
“About twenty reports of non-presentation of children have been drawn up, around fifty reports, complaints or requests for intervention have been filed with the public prosecutor's office and the Ministry of Justice in Algeria.
In total, I have carried out nearly 200 actions in five years to assert my rights… in vain”, laments the father.
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In France, his ex-wife was sentenced in 2018 to 15 months' imprisonment for child abduction, according to the judgment of the Auch criminal court, consulted by AFP.
In Algeria, she is also found guilty on numerous occasions for non-presentation of a child, as well as for forgery and use of forgery in relation to the address communicated to the father for his visitation rights, can we read on the judgments of the Harrach Criminal Court dated 2019 and 2020.
“I weigh nothing at all”
“I multiply the steps but I know full well that they will lead to nothing.
Being French, opposed to an Algerian from an influential family, I weigh nothing at all, ”breathes the thirty-year-old.
He accuses the Algerian authorities of not implementing all the means necessary to locate his ex-wife and his daughter, wanted by Interpol.
Cédric Shaurli's last hope today is on the side of the UN to whom he sent a complaint in October 2019. If it is deemed admissible on the form, the father hopes that the human rights committee will order Algeria to find the six-year-old girl whose living conditions he deplores: "carried around from one place to another, hidden and not educated".
Neither the Algerian embassy in France nor the consulate in Toulouse could be reached, AFP said.
