This is an unprecedented audience. For the first time on October 24, 2024, the Paris administrative court examined the responsibility of the French State in the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. While the proceedings before the criminal justice system against military officials or policies of the time were never successful, this time, it is the French administration as an institution which is called into question.
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With our correspondent in Kigali, Lucie Mouillaud
Among the facts alleged against the French State in a request brought by two associations and around twenty survivors, the alleged support for a genocidal regime through a military assistance agreement, the failures of French operations to Rwanda like Amaryllis or Turquoise, and in particular the abandonment of civilians on the hills of Bisesero.
“ We expect the acts that we expose to be qualified as systemic, generic faults, errors of assessment and the first of the consequences was to be in fact complicit in a genocide », underlines Philippe Raphael, lawyer who wrote this new file.
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In its defense briefs, the Ministry of the Armed Forces pleads the incompetence of the administrative court, alleging the alleged facts to be acts of government, that is to say political decisions benefiting from immunity through jurisprudence of the Council of Ministers. ‘State. An opinion shared during the hearing by the public rapporteur, but which the applicants want to contest. “ What we are defending is that acts of government have all their legitimacy to exist, that is not the subject, but that there is a tiny minority of acts which are so derogatory to the founding principles of law that the judge cannot relinquish their examinationpoints out the lawyer. The position of the problem is very simple: are acts constituting complicity in genocide part of the normality of acts of government? ? »
In total, the applicants are asking the court to order the French state to pay 500 million euros in reparations… The court decision is expected on November 14, 2024.
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