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The trial of 13 men and a woman accused of providing weapons and logistics to the perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo attacks marks the first terrorist trial in France on film. It is scheduled to begin on Wednesday (September 2)
In France, it is illegal to record court hearings on video and the offense can carry a fine of 18,000 euros.
Since a law was passed in 1985 authorizing audio and visual recordings in cases of exceptional historical interest, there have been only eight exceptions, before the Charlie Hebdo case.
In the January 2015 attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, police officers and a kosher supermarket in Paris, 17 people were killed over three days.
The first president of the Paris Court of Appeals, Jean-Michel Hayat, can grant permission to film court proceedings and did so for this case in June after receiving a special request from the National Antiterrorist Prosecutor’s Office.
“The repercussions and emotion that (the attacks) generated have substantially exceeded our borders (…) They have deeply marked the history of national and international terrorism,” he said when announcing his ruling.
On its website, the Ministry of Justice states that for an audiovisual recording to be allowed in a public hearing, the trial must be of interest to the judicial history of France.
By making an exception to the law, the authority aims to “preserve the memory of the atrocities committed and that researchers have access to images that allow them to carry out scientific investigations.
Lawyer Robert Badinter, known in France for enacting the abolition of the death penalty in 1981 while serving as Minister of Justice under François Mitterrand, was a key figure in passing the law allowing trials to be filmed due to its historical significance .
The first audiovisual recording in a French court took place in Lyon, in the Rhône department, between May 11 and July 3, 1987, of the Nazi criminal Klaus Barbie, nicknamed “the Butcher of Lyon.”
Barbie was tried for leading the Gestapo in the city, during which she had personally tortured Jean Moulin, executed many resistance fighters and hostages, and sent hundreds of Jews to their deaths, including Badinter’s father, who died. in the Sobibor death camp.
The next two trials that were videotaped by the French judicial authorities were also directly related to the Second World War.
The first was the 1994 trial of Paul Touvier, a former Lyon militia chief who worked hand in hand with the Nazis, and in late 1997 to early 1998 of Maurice Papon, a former Vichy regime official accused of being involved. in the deportation of Jews.
The eight essays that have been filmed in France
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Klaus Barbie before the Rhône Assize Court from May 11 to July 3, 1987;
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Paul Touvier before the Yvelines Criminal Court from March 17 to April 20, 1994;
- Maurice Papon before the Gironde Criminal Court from October 8, 1997 to April 2, 1998;
- Robert Faurisson, Holocaust denier, v. Robert Badinter before the Tribunal de Grande Instance in Paris from March 12 to April 2, 2007;
- First hearing on the blasting of the AZF fertilizer plant before the Criminal Court of Toulouse from February 23 to June 30, 2009;
AZF’s first appeal to the Toulouse Court of Appeal from November 3, 2012 to February 2013;
AZF’s second appeal before the Paris Court of Appeals from January 24 to May 24, 2017;
- Victims of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship before the Criminal Court of Paris from December 8 to 17, 2010;
- Pascal Simbikangwa, former soldier and member of the Rwandan intelligence services, before the Criminal Court of Paris from February 4 to March 14, 2014;
Pascal Simbikangwa on appeal to the Seine-Saint-Denis Criminal Court from October 25 to December 3, 2016;
- Octavien Ngenzi and Tite Barahirwa, two former mayors of Kabarondo in eastern Rwanda, where a massacre took place during the country’s genocide, before the Paris Criminal Court from May 10 to July 7, 2016;
Octavien Ngenzi and Tite Barahirwa on appeal to the Paris Criminal Court from May 2 to July 6, 2018.
The events may at first appear unrelated, but they all involved the deaths of French citizens.
Once the final judgment of the trials has been issued by the justice, the recording must be delivered to the national archives.
The recordings cannot be retransmitted or reproduced until 50 years later, unless it is a case of “crimes against humanity”, which was the case in the Klaus Barbie trial.
