In France, justice faces a change within the scale of the terrorist risk | EUROtoday

Changing to adapt to the period of “mass terrorism”: this is likely one of the major challenges confronted by the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor's Office (Pnat) in France lately. Just a few weeks earlier than his departure, the Justice of the Peace who heads the Pnat, Jean-François Ricard, attracts up an image of the risk in 2024 and the challenges it poses.

The one who was the primary to go this specialised prosecution, created in 2019 after the wave of assaults which affected France within the mid-2010s, should quickly be part of the cupboard of Minister of Justice Éric Dupond-Moretti, as particular advisor in cost within the battle towards terrorism and arranged crime.

First problem for his successor at Pnat – who has not but been named: the Paris-2024 Olympics.

Jean-François Ricard assures him: “Everything has been organized for months, in conjunction with the judicial police services, with the intelligence services, to act as closely and as effectively as possible to prevent the carrying out of terrorist actions. on this occasion”.

When it comes time to take stock, the 67-year-old magistrate, who has a 20-year career in anti-terrorism, both as a prosecutor and as an investigating judge, summarizes: “We have truly moved on to what we call terrorism of mass, to which it was necessary to respond with the law”.

Existence of a “projected threat” from Central Asia

Faced with this, the Pnat has change into a “formidable judging machine”, he salutes. Since its creation, 81 jihadist terrorism instances have come earlier than the specifically composed assize court docket, “eight times more” than between 1994 and 2019, whereas 260 instances have been judged earlier than the felony court docket.

“It's an entire change of scale. So a lot in order that confronted with the mountain that needed to be crossed initially of the creation of the Pnat, a sure variety of us requested ourselves the query: 'are we’ll it succeed?'” he remembers. “And this will last, for years to come,” he predicts.

At the identical time, the variety of investigations can be “high”, with “just under 700 files” in issues of terrorism, preliminary investigations and judicial data mixed.

For the Justice of the Peace, the risk is multifaceted in the present day, with “generations” and “phenomena” which “coexist, which makes reading it perhaps more complicated” than earlier than. For the second, “we are not (…) in the presence of a period of large-scale action”.

But there’s “a projected threat which is no longer completely negligible, in particular what is linked to the Islamic State of Khorasan (EI-K) with risks of projection coming from Central Asia often with relays from the North Caucasus, Ingushetia, Chechnya, Dagestan,” he says. This branch is suspected of having perpetrated the Moscow attack which left 139 dead on Friday.

Read alsoMoscow attack: Tajikistan, the weak link in Central Asia facing jihadists

Jean-François Ricard also warns of the potential “repercussions” of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. The “withdrawal periods” are also “of great use” for terrorist organizations, which take advantage of them to “reinvest areas of our territory to better ideologize them, better recruit, better think,” he explains.

A “new generation” and “veterans of jihad”

In this context, a “new technology” has appeared, alongside “jihad veterans”, “very younger” adults, even minors, “concerned in violent motion tasks” and “linked above all by networks in digital type.

A 14-year-old teenager was indicted on Friday, suspected of getting deliberate an assault towards a shopping mall in Lille.

A phenomenon, illustrated in response to him by the Arras assault wherein a professor was killed by a former scholar, issues him particularly: the “absolute refusal for ideological-religious reasons of our values, of our principles, by a a certain number of people, often quite young”, who reject “secularism”, “freedom of expression” and really feel an “absolute hatred of democracy”.

Another concern for Jean-François Ricard: radicalized prisoners who depart jail. From now on, “between 70 and 80 people convicted of jihadist terrorism are released each year”.

“Our objective is to avoid abrupt outings”, in different phrases “to have the follow-ups most adapted to their situation and also long enough”, he explains.

Resurgence of the ultra-right

Alongside jihadist terrorism, different threats exist. First and foremost, the resurgence of the ultra-right, with round fifteen instances opened since 2017, eight of which have already been judged. On the facet of the ultra-left, “the situation is not the same”. Only one case was judged on the finish of 2023, wherein seven folks have been convicted in Paris.

The Pnat has “the desire to have an ultra-rigorous vision of the notion of terrorism”, outlined by the Penal Code as an “enterprise whose purpose is to disturb public order through intimidation or terror”, assures -he. “Otherwise, it could be violent demonstrations, even very violent, it could be damage, it could be a certain form of intimidation but that is not terrorism,” declares the Justice of the Peace.

At the tip of 2022, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, denounced the “ecoterrorism” of a number of the anti-basin demonstrators in Sainte-Soline, in Deux-Sèvres.

“It would be a gift to these people who would be delighted to find themselves prosecuted for a qualification that they could then publicly contest before a court and who would emerge the big beneficiaries after having been prosecuted in an erroneous way,” warns Jean- François Ricard.

With AFP