The Pontoise court, in Val-d’Oise, was responsible for commuting this Wednesday the death sentence of Serge Atlaoui, pronounced in Indonesia.
Extraced in France last week, Serge Atlaoui, 61, will have spent nineteen years in the Indonesian jails, including seventeen years in the death corridor for drug trafficking. This Wednesday, February 12, the Pontoise court, in Val-d’Oise, had the heavy task of commuting its Indonesian capital sentence in a possible conviction in French law. The death penalty has been abolished since 1981 in France. The prosecution had requested substitution by life imprisonment, reports Le Figaro. The court ruled after about twenty minutes of deliberation in favor of a sentence of thirty years’ imprisonment, therefore following the requisitions.
“The expected incrimination finds its equivalent in French law in the production and manufacture of narcotics in an organized gang by making him incur 30 years’ imprisonment,” the court announced. Serge Atlaoui definitively judged on this case in Indonesia, French justice was not competent to rule on the substance of the case. And the public prosecutor to justify his decision: “in order not to observe the diplomatic capacity of the French State to obtain the transfer of its nationals, the judicial authority must be confined to this role” of substitution of sentence.
Arrested in November 2005 as part of a police operation, Serge Atlaoui has always denied having participated in any drug trafficking, saying that she had been hired to maintain industrial machines which, for him, were used for the manufacture of acrylic. Today, the French “is extremely relieved,” said his lawyer, Me Richard Sédillot, after the audience, relays Dauphine released. Serge Atlaoui now hopes to be able to quickly benefit from parole.