France creates a file grouping minors returned from Iraq and Syria

A decree published in the Official Journal on April 7 created a file of minors “returning from areas of operations of terrorist groups”. In fact, this “automated data processing” concerns the children of jihadist prisoners of the Islamic State held in camps in Iraq or Syria.

The file was created at the beginning of March, and should allow “better coordination of the services competent in the administrative, judicial, medical and socio-educational care of minors returning from the areas of operation of terrorist groups, with a view to ensuring their protection and preventing their involvement in a process of delinquency or radicalization”.

The decree specifies that the information concerned “are kept until the date on which the (interested) acquire their majority”after which the data is deleted.

A lawyer seizes the Defender of Rights

“I see it as a form of stigmatization, as if France had not stigmatized these children enough by refusing their protection and making them pay the price for their parents’ fault”, reacted on franceinfo the lawyer Marie Dosé, who represented several families of women and children detained in these camps. She says she seized the Defender of Rights.

In October 2022, the Minister of Justice Éric Dupond-Moretti had indicated during a hearing before the Senate that around 300 French minors who had stayed in areas of operation of terrorist groups had returned to France, including 77 by repatriation.

In January, 15 women and 32 more children were repatriated, a week after France was condemned by the UN Committee against Torture as the country’s failure to “the duty” to protect them.