The criminal court of Créteil judges this Wednesday a 25-year-old file on links between the Church of Scientology and a private school in Vincennes, without the knowledge of certain parents of students.
How to judge correctly, 25 years after the start of an investigation? All without loss of evidence, and with a sanction that makes sense and repairs the damage of the victims? This is the question that will be confronted with the criminal court of Créteil which judges from this Wednesday the file of the Aubert Institute. This non-contract private school has, according to the prosecution, been infiltrated by the Church of Scientology, without the knowledge of some parents of students and even teachers.
On the benches of the civil parties, today two women aged 31 and 33 will sit. In 1998, they were 6 and 8 years old and were educated at the Aubert Institute in Vincennes, in the Val-de-Marne. That year, the mayor of the city made a report to the prosecutor of the Republic of Créteil, evoking worrying methods of teaching practiced in the establishment. An investigation is opened, an investigating judge appointed a year later.
Ties to Scientology unknown to parents
The first investigations, as noted in the investigators’ summary, revealed “suspicions of irregularities in the administrative situation of the non-contract private education establishment, (…), allegations and false presentations or nature to mislead, in particular the indication ‘initiation to English from kindergarten’ (…) as well as on the membership of the institute to the Church of Scientology.”
These links “established by the investigation” were ignored by some of the parents of the sixty students welcomed in this establishment which offered lessons from kindergarten to college. These parents had been alerted by “behavioral problems” presented by their children while some confided that they had to “clean up” in class.
A mother told investigators that she “never would have enrolled” her son in this structure if she had known of the relationship between management and Scientology, described as a sectarian movement by Miviludes.
“serious shortcomings”
These links also had to be “hidden” from certain teachers. They testified, for some of them, not knowing that the principles they were teaching had a Scientological basis.
In particular, care “by contact”. This method, derived from the set of beliefs created by Ron Hubbard in the United States, and disseminated in France at the end of the 1950s, consists in asking an injured child to touch his wound to convince himself of an absence of pain. .
An expert report conducted as part of the investigation notes that this non-validated technique may be akin to “a significant lack of care”.
“Serious educational, didactic and pedagogical deficiencies” were also raised because of “the insufficient qualifications of teaching and supervisory staff”.
25 years of legal proceedings
The investigation demonstrated the close ties between the management team of the Aubert Institute and the Church of Scientology. Some teachers, followers of Scientology also benefited from preferential rates to educate their students. The manager of the first had indeed previously been the director of the school of awakening in Paris, reputed to be close to Scientology. In its indictment, made in 2010, the Créteil prosecutor’s office noted that the establishment was in fact “controlled” by the French branch of the movement.
The court of Créteil will therefore judge five individuals, former members of this institute, and one legal entity, the ABLE association created by the Church of Scientology.
“It is therefore a case without complexity”, according to a person close to this case.
However, no less than ten investigating judges have succeeded. The last magistrate issued his dismissal order in 2012, 14 years after the start of the investigation, taking on board the requisitions of the prosecution which demanded a trial for four people in particular for “deception”. He ruled out the ABLE association, among others, because of an already unreasonable delay in the investigation.
Heard in the context of the investigation, the people implicated in the procedure deny that the Aubert Institute had links with the Church of Scientology and ensure that the teachers did not provide any religious, Scientologist or other teaching. Contacted, their lawyers did not respond to our requests.
“Mistreatment of Justices”
The families of the children did not want to stick to this reading of the file. The Paris Court of Appeal and then the Court of Cassation nevertheless ruled against them. It was not until 2021 that they won their case before the European Court of Human Rights: the French government recognized during the procedure before the ECHR that “the duration of the investigation disregarded the provisions of Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights” which recalls the right to a trial “within a reasonable time”.
It was necessary to wait a little more than four years to obtain a trial date, suspended from the decision of the Court of Cassation which estimated last November that the unreasonable duration of an investigation or the late hearing before a court no did not invalidate the criminal proceedings.
“It’s a real denial of justice”, denounces to BFMTV.com, Me Olivier Morice, lawyer for the civil parties in this case. “The scandalous nature of the duration of the procedure constitutes a real mistreatment for the litigants.”
In parallel with the trial, the lawyer sent a letter to the Keeper of the Seals. He asks that an investigation be carried out by the General Inspectorate of Justice “so that all the light on the origin and extent of these malfunctions is established”, he writes in the document that BFMTV.com was able to consult. .
