National Asylum Court judge dismissed for lack of impartiality after posts on social media

2023-10-24 16:32:54
The National Court of Asylum (CNDA), in Montreuil, April 23, 2012. FLORENCE DURAND/SIPA

Jean-Marie Argoud, judge of the National Court of Asylum (CNDA), was dismissed from his duties on Tuesday, October 24, due to his activity on social networks, where his positions created the “doubt about his impartiality” towards immigrants, Muslims and LGBT+. “This is the first time that a CNDA judge has been challenged in such a serious case,” affirms the President of the Court, Mathieu Hérondart.

For several weeks, requests for recusal targeting the administrative magistrate Jean-Marie Argoud had accumulated. Several lawyers specializing in the defense of asylum seekers denounced his anti-refugee, Islamophobic and anti-LGBT+ community publications on his Facebook account, then public.

Tuesday, the CNDA, which rules on appeal on asylum requests rejected at first instance by the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (Ofpra), looked into three first requests for recusal which targeted the magistrate, president temporary employee of the Court since October 2021. These “recusal requests studied by three judges meeting in collegial formation were accepted”said Christine Massé-Degois, magistrate and spokesperson for the Court.

Therefore, Jean-Marie Argoud “will no longer be able to sit on the Court as of today”, Mathieu Hérondart told Agence France-Presse (AFP). “The public positions taken by Mr. Jean-Marie Argoud on social networks are likely to create doubt about his impartiality as an asylum judge”detailed the CNDA.

Supporting screenshots

An opinion shared by Lucille Watson, one of the lawyers who filed a request for recusal on October 3 that was accepted on Tuesday. His activity (publications, shares and likes) on Facebook gave “a bundle of clues which revealed a legal difficulty, a lack of impartiality, a breach of the duty of reserve in his role as magistrate at the CNDA, which precisely looks into the cases of foreign nationals, persecuted because of their origin, their religion, their sexual orientation…”she reacted.

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In a brief filed in support of the requests for recusal by the Elena association, which brings together lawyers specializing in asylum law, several of them denounce, with screenshots in support, the publications of M .Argoud “towards foreign people, of Muslim and/or LGBT faith”. In one of them, he makes a link between “Freemasons and veiled women”while on another, dated June 20, 2013, in the context of the vote on the law on marriage for all, he denounces a “corrupt political class” and the“imprisonment of opponents of the regime”.

“Let us request the intervention of the peace forces [de l’ONU] in France and the organization of an international conference to organize France’s transition to democracy”he writes in this publication attached to the memoir of the Elena association, consulted by AFP.

In addition to his personal publications, there are those he liked on the networks, notably those on three pages “with an openly xenophobic editorial line” and frontally anti-immigrant or even that of Avenir de la culture, an association whose one of the objectives assumed is to fight “against the conquering Islamism and intolerant secularism which claim to wipe out the Christian identity of France”.

So many publications which were visible on his public account until August 25, when Jean-Marie Argoud, also administrative magistrate in Marseille, was “informed of the difficulties raised by the latter”, according to the requesting lawyers. Contacted, Jean-Marie Argoud did not respond immediately.

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According to the CNDA decision, consulted by AFP, he defended himself in two bursts of observations on September 11 and October 3, arguing that he “there is no link between his publications on social networks, which fall within his freedom of expression, and the case in which his recusal is requested”. For the magistrate, “his opinions and their expression do not reveal any bias against foreigners”.

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The World with AFP