FRANCE’S MIGRANT DIVIDE
The land of ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ is torn over charges for those aiding refugees,
“They had come by foot. You could see they were cold, frightened and in pain. They needed help.” PIERRE-ALAIN MANNONI ON MEETING MIGRANTS IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE
PARIS— It was a split-second decision that would land Pierre-Alain Mannoni in court facing charges normally associated with human trafficking.
Returning home from an evening out in La Roya — rugged, mountainous back country near his home in Nice, inland from the Mediterranean Sea — his friends invited him to see an old building appropriated by activists and NGOs. They were using the space to shelter migrants, mainly from Sudan and Eritrea, who had crossed the nearby Italian border.
With more than 50 people in the abandoned railway building, they were running out of space. Mannoni was asked if he could take some people back to Nice for medical care.
“I hesitated because I was working the next day, but when I saw them the answer was clear. Three Eritrean girls appeared. They were all badly injured, one wearing a cast, another could barely walk. They had come by foot. You could see they were cold, frightened and in pain. They needed help.”
They didn’t make it far. Stopped at the highway toll booth, Mannoni was arrested under Article L622-1 of France’s immigration law. It says anyone who “facilitates or attempts to facilitate the illegal entry, movement or residence of a foreigner in France shall be punished by imprisonment for five years and a fine of 30,000.” Often referred to as the “crime of solidarity,” the law has been used to prosecute people who support migrants and asylum-seekers. Rights group Gisti says it has documented a rise in the number of such cases going to court. Earlier this month, more than 100 NGOs, charities and labour unions signed a manifesto calling for an end to the criminalization of what they say is humanitarian activity.
“What we’re seeing is that all of the cases have one purpose,” Claudia Charles, a legal expert at Gisti, says, “and that’s to discourage any kind of support for the foreign population, be they migrants, Roma or asylum seekers.”
Interior Minister Bruno Le Roux said that if no one profits from the activity, there is no crime of solidarity.
“So I can tell you that for all the cases being pursued, in court, they’re cases where we believe there is a violation of the law.”
The lack of profit was crucial for Mannoni. The 45-year-old engineer and geography professor was acquitted last week thanks to another legal clause stipulating that one must benefit from the transaction — a clear reference to human trafficking.
However, the prosecution has appealed and called for a six-month prison term.
Rights organizations say they have also documented a number of cases in which people supporting migrants have been prosecuted under other laws, including assault, defamation and “insulting public officials.”
Green party councillor Jean-Luc Munro was riding his bike in a Roma camp near Lille last April when he was told to stop by police manning a roadblock.
Munro says he was thrown from his bike and later charged with using “violence against a public official with a weapon” — his bicycle.
“There’s been a real hardening against activists for a year and a half now,” Munro told a local newspaper.
Having documented a handful of such cases between 2012 and 2015, Gisti lists more than a dozen in 2016 alone, with several more going to court in the coming months.
First framed in 1945 to tackle human trafficking, the law on “the entry and residence of foreigners and the right of asylum” was sometimes used under former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s administration to prosecute those who helped immigrants.
In 2012, the new Socialist government vowed to turn the page. “Our law cannot punish those who, in good faith, want to give a helping hand,” said then-interior minister Manuel Valls.
Human rights groups accuse the government of going back on its word.
Migrants sleeping rough complain of routine harassment by police dismantling their makeshift camps. Blankets are frequently confiscated, prompting Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) to take the rare step earlier this month of publicly denouncing police violence. MSF says it has treated several cases of hypothermia among migrants sleeping in the streets, and fears worse outcomes as the weather gets colder.
The government and the city of Paris have set up new reception centres, including one last week for women and children in Ivry-sur-Seine, just south of Paris. But they’re temporary. And where shelter shortages persist — in the capital, the south of France and near Calais, where “The Jungle” was dismantled — residents and activists are taking matters into their own hands.
Cédric Herrou began picking up hitchhiking migrants on either side of the Italian border and hosting them at his farm in Breil-sur-Roya, near Nice. Seeing that the tents and wooden cabins he erected were not enough, he brought travellers to the old railway building where Mannoni would later help the three Eritrean girls.
With border security reinforced following last July’s massacre in Nice, asylumseekers — many of them teenagers — were having difficulty getting through.
Those who did arrived hungry and exhausted.
“I picked up kids who tried to cross the border twelve times,” Herrou said at his trial earlier this month. “There were four deaths on the highway. My inaction and my silence would make me an accomplice. I do not want to be an accomplice.”
Already awaiting next month’s verdict, which carries a potential eight-month sentence, Herrou was arrested again on Wednesday for transporting undocu- mented foreigners.
Herrou’s van has been confiscated and he says he has been under surveillance and followed. Police check the identity of people visiting his house. Not that it’s had any effect on the farmer, who happily stands in photos surrounded by kids from Sudan and Eritrea.
“Whatever happens, I’ll continue,” he said before he was arrested this week.
“It’s astonishing that human smugglers continue to pass through — the real smugglers who get rich on the backs of others, while humanitarians are harassed in this way,” Herrou’s lawyer, Me Zia Oloumi, said. “The authorities can’t control the borders so they’re putting pressure on people in the valley to discourage them from supporting migrants, by detaining people and putting them on trial.”
The humanitarian crisis on Europe’s doorstep, and the resulting influx of migrants, has divided the country. La Roya — a mountainous crossroads by which they try to make their way north undetected — has come to epitomize the fractious fight.
In December, local rights group Roya Citoyenne filed a formal complaint, accusing authorities of failing to honour their obligation to look after migrating teens “suffering intensely.”
The next day, Eric Ciotti, president of Alpes-Maritimes Départment, counterattacked. He denounced “a handful of activists . . . blinded by a far-left ideology” for organizing the “clandestine entry of foreigners across the French-Italian border.”
Then he assailed Herrou, whose rescue efforts and indifference to prosecution have made him a local hero. “Who can say with certainty that of the hundreds of migrants that Mr. Herrou has proudly brought across the border,” Ciotti wrote, “there isn’t hidden among them, a future terrorist?”
Similar divisions are playing out in the national arena in the approach to the presidential elections in April and May.
Conservative front-runner François Fillon says he would not accept any more asylum-seekers than are being taken in now — a fraction of the numbers accepted in Germany.
“It’s crazy that we have reached this stage,” Mannoni says. “That I’ve gone to trial for helping someone who is hurt! The government is criminalizing human charity.”