2023-10-09 15:46:13
FIGAROVOX/TRIBUNE – On October 3, the Brussels Court of Appeal prohibited the Belgian state from transferring Salah Abdeslam to France, where the jihadist is supposed to serve his irreducible life sentence for the attacks of November 13, 2015. The lawyer Jean-Marc Delas analyzes the legal significance of this decision.
Jean-Marc Delas is a lawyer at the Paris bar.
The right to serve justice or the right to escape justice? The debate is as old as antiquity and Salah Abdeslam’s lawyers, they have just proven it, have an answer: everything according to them must be done so that he has a chance of not serving the sentence of criminal imprisonment life sentence pronounced by the special assize court on June 26, 2023. And we discover, through the decision of a Belgian court of appeal on October 3, that they have objective reasons to believe it.
Sentenced in Paris in June 2022, Salah Abdeslam was transferred to Belgium to be tried, which was done on July 25, 2023, for his participation in the attacks committed in Brussels on March 22, 2016, facts for which he was found guilty . Salah Abdeslam, exempt from sentence in Belgium (due to his life sentence in France) did not contest any of these convictions, which are now final. He must now be transferred to France to serve his French sentence.
But he filed a request with the French-speaking Brussels court of first instance seeking to have his transfer prohibited on the grounds that “ nul – in accordance with the provisions of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights – cannot be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment “. The debate before the Belgian court will take place on October 17 and, in the meantime, the Belgian court of appeal, ruling in summary proceedings, has prohibited his transfer to France.
If Salah Abdeslam remains in Belgium, he will be able to request parole after having undergone… ten years of imprisonment; even if we can imagine that he will not obtain it easily, we see the gap.
Jean-Marc Delas
We do not know whether it is reassuring or worrying that she was, and seriously, mistaken in her motivation: she is in fact basing herself, to justify her approach, on certain provisions of French criminal law which she considers to be could be contrary to the European Convention (one can never be sufficiently suspicious…), forgetting to check whether they are applicable. They are not, it is a completely different debate, because it targets a law which was only applicable from June 5, 2016, that is to say after the attacks committed. But that says a lot about the confidence we can have in Belgian justice.
Let’s return to the hearing of October 17 and take up Péguy’s phrase, often used today as it has never been more relevant: “ We must always say what we see; above all, we must always, it is more difficult, see what we see “. We can clearly see what is apparent, a very improbable failure by France to meet human rights standards. It is less clear, if you are not a legal practitioner, what is hidden: if Salah Abdeslam remains in Belgium, he will be able to request conditional release after having undergone… ten years of imprisonment; even if we can imagine that he will not obtain it easily, we see the gap. Above all, we see the gulf between an irreducible life sentence and conditional release, theoretically possible from 2026. Let us point out, it is not superfluous, that the European Court ruled on November 13, 2014 that the actual life sentence practiced in France does not violate human dignity and complies with European law.
Those who most vomit out Western civilization and everything that makes it humanity are the first to appropriate it, and to take up arms when it serves their interests.
Jean-Marc Delas
All this hullabaloo, which does not leave the victims indifferent, who have better understood, often in their flesh, that justice was the best, and above all the only, substitute for revenge, leads to an observation and two questions. The observation is contained in a few words and no longer surprises many people: those who most vomit up Western civilization and everything that makes it humanity (the Age of Enlightenment and what it has bequeathed to us, reason, law, a certain conception of justice) are the first to appropriate it, and to take up arms when it serves their interests. We’ll never get tired of it… or maybe, at this rate, we’ll get tired of it soon.
First question: has justice been done, and done well? A trial, which everyone remembers, hailed as being the most beautiful and the best response that a rule of law could offer to barbarism. Ten months at the end of which the debate on the just and proportionate sentence was rich in the contradiction between a very well-argued and convincing accusation in its arguments on the incompressibility of the life sentence, and a defense, as independent in spirit as it is free in his means and his words, to oppose it. And finally, a deliberation, a judgment, a solid motivation: justice rendered in the name of the sovereign people. Except for a few grumpy people by nature or profession, an irreproachable court decision.
The law does not allow, even in its plasticity, to do anything: it will be enough for Belgian judges not to make a mistake in the applicable text, which still seems possible.
Jean-Marc Delas
Second question: should we be afraid of the law? Always, answer those who practice it and know that it is a plastic art! Concrete application: can the law, as it is interpreted in Belgium, prevent the execution of a sentence legally and legitimately pronounced in France? We can obviously be worried when we see to what extent the Belgian summary judge, first instance and appeal combined, has got his brushes mixed up. Fortunately the reasons not to be clearly outweigh it.
Firstly because Belgian justice knows that it will be observed by all those who are, and this goes well beyond the victims concerned, interested in the decision it will render. Then and above all because the law does not allow, even in its plasticity, to do anything: it will be enough for Belgian judges not to make a mistake in the applicable text, which still seems possible. The sentence handed down against Salah Abdeslam is governed by article 720-4 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. The European Court of Human Rights judged it, in its judgment of November 13, 2014, to be in compliance with the provisions of the European Convention. Force should therefore remain… with justice.
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