2023-05-15 20:50:00
DISPATCH – This Monday, May 15, representatives of the Ministry of Justice acknowledged the existence of a nominative file of people placed in police custody during the mobilization on pensions, in Lille. According to them, it is a “simple management tool”.
The Administrative Court considered two interim applications filed by the Association for the Defense of Constitutional Liberties (Adelico) and the Syndicate of Lawyers of France, as well as by the League of Human Rights (LDH), after an article by Médiapart denounced such filing.
This is an Excel spreadsheet, named “Monitoring of criminal proceedings – pension reform movement” detailing the surnames, first names and dates of birth of the people placed in police custody during the demonstrations, as well as the criminal consequences given. . According to the ministry, this file is authorized by the decree governing the Casiopée database, which brings together in secure software the data of defendants, victims or witnesses of legal proceedings over the past ten years.
The spreadsheet examined “simply brings together the procedures related to the same event, which Casiopée does not allow to do in real time”, and contains “no other information” than that authorized in this database, detailed at the hearing a representative of the ministry. If “the chancellery did not give this instruction”, it was a “tool for local management”, he assured. This “allows the management of a particular event” with a high “volume of police custody”, explained another representative, referring to the existence of other files of this type in other cities.
That being said, by assembling personal information, the prosecutors “have allowed themselves to add a major piece of data: a political opinion”, all these people having protested against the reform, objected Jean-Baptiste Soufron, lawyer for Adelico and of FAS. “It is not authorized” and “it amounts to filing political opponents”, he denounced.
“If the goal is only statistical, why keep identifying data, and not be satisfied with an investigation number”, put forward the lawyer of the LDH, Marion Ogier. She explained a few days earlier that “for this kind of sensitive file, it normally takes a decree or order to set a legal framework.” However, still according to her, it would be in this specific case “a clandestine file which has never been authorized”. “There is no legal framework and no guarantee,” she lamented.
According to her, a few dozen people have potentially been on file, 50 to 100 arrests having taken place in the jurisdiction of Lille since March 17, the date on which the file was created following the hardening of the mobilization after the use of 49-3 .
According to AFP, the prosecutor of Lille and the public prosecutor of Douai, also targeted by the appeals, were neither present nor represented at the hearing. The judge is due to rule Thursday on the legality of the file.
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