Information Note on the Court’s case-law No. 125
December 2009
Daoudi v. France - 19576/08
Judgment 3.12.2009 [Section V]
Article 3
Degrading treatment
Inhuman treatment
Expulsion
Deportation to Algeria of a person convicted in France of terrorist offences: deportation would constitute a violation
Facts – The applicant is currently subject to a compulsory residence order in France. He arrived in France in 1979 with his parents, went to school there and later worked there as a computer engineer. He acquired French nationality by naturalisation in January 2001. Between 1999 and 2001 he allegedly developed close contacts with radical Islamist groups and admitted, among other things, that he had attended a paramilitary training course in Afghanistan in 2001. In September 2001 the applicant was arrested during an operation to dismantle a radical Islamist group allegedly affiliated to al‑Qaeda. He was suspected of having prepared a suicide attack on the United States Embassy in Paris. He was charged with, among other things, conspiracy to prepare an act of terrorism. In 2002 he was stripped of his French nationality. In 2005 the tribunal de grande instance found him guilty as charged, sentenced him to nine years’ imprisonment and ordered his permanent exclusion from French territory. The Court of Appeal upheld the judgment but reduced the sentence to six years’ imprisonment.
In 2008 the applicant applied to have the order permanently excluding him from French territory lifted. On his release he was taken to an administrative detention centre, where he immediately applied for asylum, contested the administrative decision stipulating that he was to be deported to Algeria and sought to have the measure against him stayed. On the same day the European Court, to which the applicant had applied for an interim measure under Rule 39 of the Rules of Court, indicated to the French Government that it would be advisable not to deport the applicant to Algeria pending the outcome of the proceedings before it. Four days later he was made the subject of a compulsory residence order in France. The applicant’s applications and appeals were subsequently dismissed. An appeal on points of law against a decision of the National Court of Asylum is pending before the Conseil d’Etat.
Law – Article 3: With regard to the situation in Algeria, the Court had regard first of all to reports of the United Nations Committee against Torture and of a number of non-governmental organisations describing a worrying situation. Those conclusions were reflected in, among other sources, reports of the US Department of State and the UK Ministry of the Interior. Whilst those reports found that there had been a significant improvement as far as general security in Algeria was concerned, they nonetheless pointed to numerous instances of arrests by officers of the Security Services (or DRS), in particular of persons suspected of involvement in international terrorism. According to the aforementioned sources, such persons, who were detained without any review by the judicial authorities or any communication with the outside, could be subjected to ill-treatment including torture. The practices complained of, apparently committed with impunity mainly with a view to extracting confessions and information subsequently used as evidence by the courts, included repeated interrogations at all times of day or night, threats, blows, electric shocks, forced ingestion of large quantities of dirty water, urine or chemicals, and the suspension of detainees by their arms from the ceiling. Such practices undoubtedly reached the level proscribed by Article 3. With regard to the frequency of the ill-treatment described, there was no evidence that the practices had ceased or even abated in Algeria with regard to persons suspected of acts of terrorism. Having regard to the authority and reputation of the authors of the above-mentioned reports, the many corroborative and reliable sources of information, the thorough nature of the investigations – undertaken recently – and the factual evidence on which they were based, the Court had no cause to doubt the reliability of the evidence thus gathered.
The applicant had been convicted of conspiring to prepare a terrorist attack in September 2001, by a group affiliated to al-Qaeda. The attack was profoundly symbolic because American interests in France had been directly targeted. The applicant’s conviction, imposed at first instance and upheld on appeal, had been the subject of two extensively reasoned and detailed judicial decisions that had been made public. Furthermore, both the domestic proceedings and part of the proceedings before the Court (interim measure and admissibility) had attracted international media attention. Above all, during the deportation proceedings commenced in April 2008, the French authorities had applied to the Algerian Consulate General to arrange a hearing of the applicant and had provided an information note indicating his civil status, the offence of which he had been convicted and a copy of his Algerian passport. That information had subsequently been validated by diplomatic contacts. The applicant was therefore well known to the Algerian authorities, as were the reasons for his conviction. Admittedly, there was no evidence that a warrant was out for the applicant’s arrest or that he had been convicted by the Algerian authorities; nor did the Algerian legal system provide that a person could be tried twice for the same offence. However, those factors were not decisive in the present case. Indeed, it was clear from the above-mentioned reports that persons suspected of involvement in terrorist-related offences were arrested and detained by the DRS in unforeseeable circumstances and without clearly established legal grounds, mainly for the purposes of being interrogated to obtain information, rather than in the furtherance of a judicial aim. Persons detained by the DRS did not have the benefit of adequate judicial safeguards and the fact of having already been convicted abroad did not in any way rule out the risk of being arrested in Algeria. In that connection, even if, in the light of the examples given by the parties, systematic arrests by the DRS of persons involved in terrorist activities did not appear to have been established, particularly regarding the applicant’s co-accused at the trial in France, the Court found particularly significant the fact that a number of reliable sources referred to many cases of this type and reported secret detentions that had lasted several months. It did not appear possible to monitor developments in the country. There was no control system in place to ensure that detainees would not be tortured in secret centres inaccessible to anyone, and it would appear that if the applicant was placed in such conditions, he would be unable to submit to the domestic or international courts any complaints he might raise as to the treatment to which he was subjected. Furthermore, and the parties did not dispute this, the amnesty provided for by the Algerian Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation was not applicable to the applicant.
For all the foregoing reasons, and having particular regard to the profile of the applicant, who was not only suspected of links with terrorism but had been convicted of a serious offence in France of which the Algerian authorities were aware, the Court found that it was likely that, were he to be deported to Algeria, he would become a target for the DRS. It pointed out, moreover, that having regard to the nature and degree of the applicant’s involvement in radical Islamist networks, the National Court of Asylum had considered it reasonable to believe that, on account of the Algerian security services’ interest in the applicant, the latter might, on his arrival in Algeria, be subjected to methods or procedures capable of being regarded as inhuman or degrading treatment. Accordingly, in the particular circumstances of the case, there were substantial grounds for concluding that there was a real risk that the applicant would be subjected to treatment contrary to Article 3 if he were deported to Algeria.
Conclusion: violation of Article 3 in the event of implementation of the decision to deport the applicant to Algeria (unanimously).
Article 41: Finding of a violation constituted sufficient just satisfaction in respect of any non-pecuniary damage.
© Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights
This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.
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