2023-05-15 19:40:58
During an interim hearing at the Administrative Court of Lille, Monday, May 15, representatives of the Ministry of Justice acknowledged the existence of a file of names of people placed in police custody during the mobilization on pensions in Lille. , which they described as a simple ” management tool “ administrative.
The court was examining two applications for interim relief filed by the Association for the Defense of Constitutional Liberties (Adelico) and the Syndicate of Lawyers of France (SAF) as well as by the League for Human Rights (LDH), after the publication of an article of Mediapart denouncing such filing. The judge must render his decision Thursday on the legality of the said file.
Identities of persons placed in police custody listed
Named “Monitoring of criminal proceedings – pension reform movement”, the latter is an Excel spreadsheet detailing the surnames, first names, dates of birth of people placed in police custody during the demonstrations against the pension reform and the criminal consequences given to their arrest. According to the Ministry of Justice, this file is authorized by the decree governing the Cassiopée 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 Cassiopée does not allow to do in real time”and does not contain “no further information” than those authorized in this base, detailed a representative of the ministry. Whether “the chancellery did not give this instruction”it is a “tool for local management”, assured the latter. That “allows the management of a particular event” with a strong “volume of police custody”explained another representative, referring to the existence of other files of this type in cities other than Lille.
“This amounts to filing political opponents”
But for the organizations that contest the existence of the file, by grouping personal information the prosecutors “have allowed themselves to add a major piece of data: a political opinion”since all the people on file are for having protested against the pension reform, argued Jean-Baptiste Soufron, lawyer for Adelico and SAF. ” It is not allowed “ et “this amounts to filing political opponents”he denounced. “If the goal is only statistical, why keep identifying data, and not be satisfied with a survey number”highlighted the lawyer of the LDH, Marion Ogier.
According to her, a few dozen people have potentially been on file, fifty to a hundred arrests having taken place in the jurisdiction of Lille since March 17, the date on which the file was created, after the hardening of the mobilization against the reform created by the use of Article 49.3 of the Constitution by the government.
The prosecutor of Lille and the public prosecutor of Douai, also targeted by the appeals, were neither present nor represented at the hearing.
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