Hayat Boumeddiene, wife of one of the perpetrators of the January 2015 Paris terrorist attacks. © DR

The trial in Paris of 14 people accused of complicity in the separate January 2015 terrorist attacks in the French capital against Charlie Hebdo magazine, a kosher store, and a policewoman, which left 17 victims dead, opened on Wednesday. Absent from the hearings are three defendants whose fate or eventual whereabouts is unknown. In this second of a two-part report, Matthieu Suc details the story of how the three got away, and the evidence that at least one of them is alive and hiding from justice in the Middle East.

A Sanofi distribution centre at Val-de-Reuil in Normandy. © Joel Saget/ AFP

The French pharmaceuticals firm Sanofi has been in the headlines recently because of its setbacks in producing a vaccine against Covid-19, which will not now be ready until the end of 2021 at the earliest. Yet the group has nonetheless decided to go ahead with its restructuring plans and will be trimming back on its research while also moving many of its production plants into a separate company to be sold off. France is now paying the price for having abandoned its industrial and research strategies over the last thirty years. Martine Orange investigates.

Rui Pinto is living under police protection ahead of his trial which opens on September 4th. © Sonja Och / Der Spiegel

Rui Pinto, the whistleblower behind the Football Leaks revelations of corruption and fraud that have rocked the world of professional football, is to stand trial in Portugal on September 4th. The 31-year-old faces 90 charges which carry up to 25 years in prison. But after reaching a cooperation agreement with Portuguese authorities, he is now in a witness protection scheme. Der Spiegel magazine, Mediapart’s partner in the European Investigative Collaborations network which jointly published the Football Leaks investigations, has met with Pinto ahead of his trial.

Anti-coup protestors gather in a mass demonstration in the centre of Yangon, February 12th 2021. © Collectif The Myanmar Project

The civilian protest movement in Myanmar against the military coup of February 1st continued on Monday, when a general strike was held and hundreds of thousands again took to the streets of major towns and cities, including the capital Nay Pyi Taw, Yangon and Mandalay, despite the junta's warnings against a “confrontation path where they will suffer the loss of life”. A group of young journalists in Myanmar, a collective called The Myanmar Project, have spent the past three weeks documenting the unfolding events across the country. Here, under cover of anonymity, they tell Laure Siegel what motivated them and how they go about their reporting.

Left to right: an undated photo of Aloys Ntiwiragabo, and pictured on his way to church in February 2020 in Orléans. © DR

The Rwandan authorities have issued an international warrant for the arrest and extradition of Aloys Ntiwiragabo, a former head of the country’s military intelligence who is accused of playing a key role in the 1994 genocide in which an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered, after an investigation by Mediapart revealed that he had settled with his wife in the French town of Orléans.

Small dinghies used by migrants to cross the Channel, lined up in the port of Dover. © AFP

The numbers of migrants attempting hazardous clandestine crossings of the Channel to reach Britain, mostly in overcrowded small dinghies, has soared this year, already reaching well more than double the total of 2019. Now the British government has called on the Royal Navy to assist the country’s Border Force in a move officials say is intended to make the crossings “unviable”. In this interview with Mediapart, François Gemenne, a prominent Belgian political scientist specialised in migratory issues, says that the situation in the Channel is comparable to that in the Mediterranean and warns that “the idea of closing migratory routes is absurd and dangerous” and “will lead to yet more tragedies”.

Emmanuel Macron and his political ally François Bayrou in January 2020. © AFP

As a presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron insisted he wanted to dispense with the old ways of doing politics. Yet over this summer President Macron has approved a series of appointments of loyal followers and advisers as well as political allies who have faced difficulties but whose support he may need. And as Manuel Jardinaud reports, this form of presidential patronage is exactly what French presidents have always done.

Justice minister Éric Dupond Moretti leaving a meeting of ministers at the Elysée on December 9th 2020. © Arthur Nicholas Orchard / Hans Lucas via AFP

France's justice minister Éric Dupond-Moretti is planning to bring in a raft of reforms to the country's legal system. But prosecutors and many lawyers are worried at the minister's plans to create a new hybrid status for in-house or company legal staff and to grant them the same “legal privilege” as independent lawyers. The move is designed to help defend large French companies against the long arm of the American justice system. Yet critics fear the change would stop French investigators from getting hold of key company documents and become a further obstacle to tackling corruption. Pierre Januel reports.

A typcal housekeeping scene in France; housekeeper Christelle. © Julien Pitinome: Collectif L'Oeil- collectif La Friche

France's upper classes look upon housemaids and housekeepers from Portugal as the most honest of domestic staff and as “pearls who they must hold on to at all costs”. Yet behind the walls of these families' sumptuous properties there lurks another world; one in which class differences are very much alive. Mediapart has spoken to Portuguese maids and housekeepers working in the north of France and heard their stories of long hours, unrelenting toil and penny-pinching employers. Mickaël Correia reports.

The public broadcaster television channel France Ô was created to showcase the programmes and culture of France's overseas territories to Metropolitan France and provide a link between the country's mainland and its far-flung lands. But now the government in Paris has decided to axe the channel, which has been getting very low viewing figures. It will broadcast for the last time on August 23rd. Ministers insist that the channel will be replaced by a new online portal and that programmes about the overseas territories, from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, will be shown in greater numbers on existing public broadcast channels. But as Julien Sartre reports, many fear that France's overseas territories may simply become “invisible” once more.

An undated photo of Aloys Ntiwiragabo from a report by NGO African Rights.

In July Mediapart revealed that Rwandan colonel Aloys Ntiwiragabo, who is suspected of playing an important role in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis, was now living in Orléans in France. Now we can reveal that the former head of Rwandan military intelligence has been living here for at least 14 years. Yet, curiously, paperwork acknowledging his request for political asylum in France was only sent to him in February 2020. The fact that his asylum application has only been made recently raises questions about what Aloys Ntiwiragabo's status had been in the meantime - and whether he had received discreet support. Théo Englebert reports.

A poster placed in front of Paris City Hall in support of Fariba Adelkhah. © BERTRAND GUAY / AFP

Two academics, one from the prestigious Paris Sciences Po school of political sciences, the other from Melbourne University’s Asia Institute, are currently detained in atrocious conditions in separate prisons in Iran. Anthropologist Fariba Adelkhah, who has joint French-Iranian nationality, is serving a five-year sentence at the notorious Evin prison in Tehran for allegedly violating the country’s national security, and Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a lecturer in Islamic studies with joint British-Australian nationality, is serving a ten-year sentence for alleged espionage at Iran’s harshest women’s prison located in desert land south of the capital. Both strongly proclaim their innocence, but appear trapped in what their colleagues believe is a ruthless game of hostage taking and prisoner swaps. Jean-Pierre Perrin reports.

Covid-19 vaccines are competing in Europe in a multi-billion euro market. © AFP

The so-called “big pharma” groups are engaged in fierce competition to produce efficacious Covid-19 vaccines. While Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna have gained widespread approval for their vaccines, that of France’s flagship pharma group Sanofi, developed in partnership with UK drugs firm GSK, is seriously delayed after disappointing clinical tests. Some argue that Sanofi should serve the public interest and turn to producing the approved vaccines of its rivals, supplies of which are disrupted. But, as Rozenn Le Saint reports, the stakes are high and defeat would be costly in more ways than one.

A portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) by Santi di Tito. © dr

“The end justifies the means” is a well-known phrase that for many represents the height of political cynicism, a notion that justifies any crime, and is very often thought to have been first used by Italian Renaissance diplomat, political philosopher and writer Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli. Indeed, to be “Machiavellian” is to be underhand, cunning, unscrupulous and scheming. But, as Jean-Christophe Piot sets out here, the much-maligned Florentine thinker never wrote nor believed in the phrase that has been stuck to him.

Newly appointed French interior minister Gérald Darmanin. © NurPhoto via AFP

In a French government reshuffle earlier this month, former junior budget minister Gérald Darmanin, under investigation over rape allegations, was given the senior post of interior minister. Darmanin, 37, a loyal ally of former president Nicolas Sarkozy who has been sent for future trial on separate counts of corruption and illegal election campaign spending, has since caused widespread outrage with his comments on the issue of police violence and racial and religious tensions. In this op-ed article, Mediapart publishing editor Edwy Plenel argues why not only Darmanin’s appointment should never have taken place, but why he should now be dismissed in the name of the morality required of public office.