• Source: 8 December 2020 case

      • The 8 December 2020 case (French: Affaire du 8 décembre 2020) refers to the arrests of nine French citizens who had joined the Kurdish People's Defense Units (YPG) by French authorities in December 2020. Having volunteered to fight with the Kurdish forces against the Islamic State and having returned to France in 2018, they were designated as far-left extremists by the General Directorate for Internal Security and were arrested in a series of raids on 8 December 2020. Seven of the nine were then criminally charged with associations with terrorism. The case is the first far-left terrorist case to be brought to court in France since the trial of Action Directe in 1995, and has been marked by controversies over mistreatment of the accused in detention and about the strength of the evidence.


      Background


      Several dozen French citizens have travelled to Syria since 2015 to join Rojava forces in the fight against Islamic extremists Daesh. In September 2019, Mediapart reported that French intelligence had placed a number of those volunteers under surveillance.


      Case




      = Involved people

      =
      The case involved nine French citizens who had volunteered with the YPG. Police considered the leader of the nine to be Florian D., also known by the pseudonym Libre Flot, a former volunteer French teacher in the Calais Jungle before leaving to Rojava in 2017 to volunteer with the YPG. Simon G. was a former pyrotechnician at Disneyland. Loïc M., William D. et Bastien A. had previously met Florian D. at the Zone to Defend at the Sivens Dam project. Camille B., originally from Brittany, was the only woman among the accused.


      = Arrests

      =
      On 8 December 2020, at six in the morning, the General Directorate for Internal Security (Direction générale de la Sécurité intérieure, or DGSI) and the RAID conducted raids to arrest nine French citizens who had returned from Rojava, in Syria, in 2018. Those nine had all travelled to Rojava to join the YPG to assist in the fight against Daesh. National Centre for Counter Terrorism head Laurent Nuñez claimed that the arrests demonstrated that there was an increased risk of far-left extremism in France.


      = Legal proceedings

      =
      After being detained for three days, two of the arrested were subsequently released, whereas the other seven (six men and one woman, all in their early 30s) were charged with criminal association with intent to commit terrorist acts. A police source claimed to newspaper Sud Ouest that the arrested were "trying to purchase weapons, were training, and preparing explosives," and that they had vague undefined plans to target "the police or the military."
      After a few months, however, only Florian D., was still under detention. He was conditionally released for health reasons in April 2022.
      In October 2023, the trial of the seven accused began at the 16th court of the Tribunal judiciaire de Paris.


      Mistreatment in custody


      In late February 2022, Florian D. began a hunger strike in protest against the poor conditions and the solitary confinement of his detention. In his letter, he stated that it had been "more than 14 months that I’ve been buried alive in a hellish and permanent solitude without having anyone to talk to" and that the director of detentions of the prison he was being held in had told him that his "placement and my maintenance in solitary confinement were decided from the first day by very high ranking people and that whatever I say or [the director of detentions] says or does, nothing will be done about it." After being hospitalised due to the hunger strike, he was conditionally released for health reasons on 7 April.
      During four months of detention, the only woman among the accused underwent nineteen full-body strip searches and claimed to have been threatened with sexual assault. On 8 March 2023, she was issued 200€ compensation after a French court found two of the strip searches illegal.


      Criticism


      The charges brought against the seven have been controversial, and have been compared to the Tarnac Nine.
      Monde diplomatique journalist Philippe Baqué has stated that none of the objects claimed by the police to be material for explosives seized during the arrests were particularly uncommon or unusual to be owned, and that, as of April 2021, the police have yet to release clear evidence of intent to commit terrorist acts. One of the arrested wrote in Lundi Matin that, contrary to police claims, they had not been an organised group and their detentions were the first time some of them had met. Harrison Stetler and Rona Lorimer of The Nation stated that the accused "had no identifiable plan whatsoever to commit acts of violence" and that the trial was "about dusting off France’s anti-terrorism statutes to target activists on the left," comparing it to the French government's forced dissolution of environmentalist group Les Soulèvements de la Terre in 2023, in which the group was targeted with anti-terrorist police raids.
      Isabelle Sommier of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University stated that arrests seemed politically motivated, "to demonstrate that the state is doing something" against recent demonstrations that had broken out in violence.
      French digital rights NGO La Quadrature du Net cited this case as an example for the attempt to outlaw the use of encryption.


      References

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