Human rights federation censures emergency laws

Emergency "anti-terrorist" legislation enacted during a bombing campaign in France 13 years ago has resulted in arbitrary justice and widespread violations of the European Convention on Human Rights, according to the Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights Leagues.

At a press conference yesterday, FIDH lawyers called for the dissolution of the "anti-terrorist section" of the Paris tribunal, which is led by the right-wing judge Mr Jean-Louis Brugiere. They recommended the abrogation of the 1986 law that gives extraordinary powers to Mr Brugiere. The law also created special courts where magistrates do not have to explain their decisions, which cannot be appealed.

The 1986 law was drawn up under the former interior minister, Mr Charles Pasqua, who said he wanted to "terrorise the terrorists". "The real question is whether in the name of the struggle against terrorism you are allowed to violate the basic principles of justice," Mr Patrick Baudouin, of the FIDH, said.

The 53-page report was written by a British lawyer, Mr Michael McColgan, with the help of an Italian colleague. It condemns long pre-trial detention in France, which defies the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights. Detention is used to put pressure on suspects to confess or name accomplices. In the "Chalabi trial" of 138 people accused of belonging to an Algerian Islamist network, the accused were held for an average of 14 months before being brought to trial. The verdicts in the Chalabi trial are to be handed down today.

Detainees in France do not have the right to a lawyer during interrogation, which is "frequently carried out in an irregular and disconnected manner over long periods" resembling "an inquisition in the narrow, medieval sense of the term", Mr McColgan wrote.

The "preventive round-up" of 80 suspected Islamists by Judge Brugiere was a "publicity stunt" aimed at the "cynical exploitation of fear of immigrants" in the runup to the World Cup last May, the report said.

The report recommends that the charge of "association of evildoers in relation with a terrorist undertaking" be struck from French law because it is a catch-all charge "based on a minimum of objective, independent evidence and on a maximum of speculation and insinuations".

Mr Jean-Pierre Dubois, a law professor who contributed to the report, said that while the Chalabi "show trial" was going on, more important cases entrusted to Judge Brugiere, including the February 1998 assassination of the prefect of Corsica and a December 1996 bombing which killed four people in Paris, were unresolved. "The majority of people [in the Chalabi trial] have only one thing in common - the sound of their name or the look of their face," Mr Dubois said. Virtually all of the defendants are of Algerian origin. "Instead of fighting terrorism, we are creating hatred in our [immigrant] suburbs," he said. "This trial is deeply discriminatory."