The Lyon retirement home where Father Johannes Rivoire lives, accused of sexual assault on young Inuit in Canada in the 1970s, was targeted on Monday by a punch action organized to demand his extradition, AFP noted. .
“Here lives the priest J. Rivoire. He raped Inuit children. We demand justice ”: in a few minutes, the 7 activists of the BeBrave France movement, which campaigns against incest and sexual violence against children, pasted this text on the glass facade of the establishment, in the district of La Croix -Redhead.
On the sidewalks of the surrounding streets, inscriptions have also been stencilled, with arrows in support: “the priest and pedophile J. Rivoire lives in this Ehpad. He is running away from justice”.
Microphone in hand, the founder of BeBrave France, which claims 300 members, Arnaud Gallais, then demanded the extradition of the nonagenarian in a speech read twice to President Macron: “As French citizens, we have shame that our country obstructs justice and protects a paedocriminal”.
The action took place without hindrance but, at its end, the leader of the Ehpad came to ask the activists to leave the place, “a private space”, and to remove the collages “to preserve the residents”.
France rejected in October 2022 the request for extradition to Canada of this religious of French-Canadian nationality.
This decision is motivated by the fact that French law prohibits France from extraditing its own citizens and that “too much time has passed between the events and the filing of the charges”, according to the press release from the Service des Public Prosecutions of Canada (PPSC). This last point also blocks any legal proceedings in France.
Aged 92, the former missionary of the Congregation of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI) is the subject of a Canadian arrest warrant for having sexually assaulted a child in the Canadian Arctic between January 1974 and December 1979. He had already targeted by a first arrest warrant between 1998 and 2017 for sexual assaults against three minors.
The former missionary has always denied these accusations and repeated his denials in September when meeting a delegation of Inuit who came to Lyon to support the extradition request. On this occasion, his congregation announced that it had launched an exclusion procedure against him.