These new decisions bring to eleven the number of condemnations of France by the ECHR on this subject, underlined this Thursday the association La Cimade, present in several CRAs in France.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) pinned France on Thursday in two separate cases of placement in a detention center for foreign minors, some of whom are very young, aged seven and eight months.
In a first case, France was condemned for the detention, decided in January 2021 by the prefecture of Bas-Rhin, of a Guinean mother and her son aged seven and a half months, for nine days, with a view to their transfer to Spain under the so-called “Dublin III” regulation, indicates the Court in its judgment.
Violations of the right to liberty and security
“Given the very young age” of the child, “the reception conditions in the Metz-Queuleu detention center” where they had been sent and the duration of the detention, “the Court considers” that they were “subjected to treatment which exceeded the threshold of severity required by Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits inhuman and degrading treatment, underlines the ECHR. The latter allocated a total of 19,000 euros to the applicants.
A similar violation was found in another case, that of four Angolans, a mother and her three children aged eight months, six and thirteen at the time of the events. By decision of the Bas-Rhin prefecture, they had been detained at the beginning of 2020 at the administrative detention center (CRA) in Metz-Queuleu, then transferred to CRA N.2 in Mesnil-Amelot (Seine-et-Marne) with a view to their transfer to Portugal, again under “Dublin III”.
“Beyond a brief period of detention, the repetition and accumulation of the effects generated (…) by a deprivation of liberty necessarily lead to harmful consequences for a minor child”, insists the judicial arm of the Council of the Europe, according to which the applicants had been detained for ten days. The Court awarded them 8,000 euros for material damage.
In these two cases, the ECHR also found violations of the right to liberty and security, and of the right to have the lawfulness of the Convention detention decided speedily.
In both cases, it had also activated an article which governs emergency measures, to demand and obtain the end of detentions.
