“They're destroying my life. I'm going to lose everything,” says a distraught 'Mahmoud' – not his real name – after his world was turned upside down on July 8th when French police knocked on his door to announce that he was being placed under house arrest for three months.
“It's surreal. I feel stunned, I can't understand what's happening to me. I can no longer sleep at night. I spend my days worrying. My doctor has put me on antidepressants,” he explains to Mediapart. With the upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris – they start on July 26th - Mahmoud is among the many people placed under house arrest due to their supposed threat to public order.
On Wednesday, July 17th, the interior minister Gérald Darmanin announced that 155 people had been put under what are called individual measures of control and surveillance – known by their French acronym as MICAS - obliging them to stay within a defined perimeter and report daily to a police station. These were “very dangerous individuals or those who could potentially take action” and who had to be “kept away from the opening ceremony or the Olympic Games”, he explained. The minister also announced that 164 administrative searches had been carried out.
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“I keep getting calls about this,” says lawyer Lucie Simon. “I can't take on all the cases due to lack of time, but I have been contacted by about fifteen people in a month.” His legal colleague Vincent Brengarth agrees. “There's clearly a significant increase. Several of us handling these cases have noticed it. I hadn't seen anything like this since 2017, or even 2015,” he says, referring to a period when France came under a series of bloody terrorist attacks and was under a state of emergency.
“There's certainly an increase,” confirms Nicolas Klausser, a research fellow at the CESDIP centre for research on the law and criminal law institutions (CESDIP), who is currently taking part in a large empirical study on house arrests. This study has not yet got the results that would allow for an analysis of the recent wave of such measures, but it does provides a preliminary overview of the application of MICAS orders, the new name for house arrests since they were incorporated into common law in 2017 (see box below).
Preliminary figures, dating from the end of 2023, show in particular that 68% of the people targeted by such measures had just been released from prison. “MICAS orders are increasingly becoming the continuance of a sentence,” explains the researcher. However, he says, the “novelty with the Olympics is that many people targeted have never had a conviction, or one from a very long time ago”.
Employment contract suspended
Mahmoud fits this new profile of people who are being placed under house arrest. “I've never been convicted, never been to prison,” he assures Mediapart. And for good reason. Mahmoud has been employed for eleven years by a subcontractor at a major airport. Every day he has access to the runways and all secure areas. To obtain this access he had to be accredited by the Ministry of the Interior following an administrative investigation.
The house arrest order accuses him of having been in contact with a radicalised person, a mandatory condition for the issue of a MICAS. But Mahmoud vehemently denies this. “I don’t know anyone radicalised!” he insists. “That said, I know three-quarters of the airport’s employees, but I don’t know everyone’s past.”
But it was one specific incident that the Ministry of the Interior's order highlighted the most. One evening, in November 2023, Mahmoud had an altercation with a neighbour who accused him of making too much noise. The neighbour filed a complaint and claimed to have been the target of anti-Semitic insults, such as “dirty Jew, we are Hamas, you’re a little Jewish pig”. The neighbour even claimed that these insults had been going on for a year.
“It was around the time of the Hamas attack in Israel,” recalls Mahmoud. “It’s all false. It’s slander. I later learned that this neighbour wasn’t quite right in the head and had already filed a complaint against another neighbour because he thought his cat was too noisy!”
“I let the police examine my phone and I believe what they found convinced them it was nonsense,” he continues. “I was released and the case was dismissed.”
I have a loan and rent to pay. I don’t know if they realise that I'm going to end up on the street.
Mahmoud is now waiting for his appeal to be heard by the administrative court, with a hearing scheduled for July 24th. He will be defended by Samy Djemaoun, another lawyer representing several people under house arrest. As a union representative, he is also supported by his employer and his union.
Nevertheless, his employment contract has been suspended. First of all, because he works irregular hours that rotate every four days, and all his requests to adjust his reporting time to the police station have been denied. Secondly, because his accreditation allowing him to work at the airport was suspended by the Ministry of the Interior on July 15th.
Mahmoud is thus left without a job and without any income. “If, on July 24th, the administrative court’s presiding judge doesn’t lift the MICAS, I lose everything,” he says. “I have a loan and rent to pay. I don’t know if they realise that I'm going to end up on the street.”
House Arrest for two videos posted in late 2023
In another case, Vincent Brengarth has been defending a person who was placed under house arrest for actions that did not lead to any conviction. This case involves a young man whom the Ministry of the Interior accuses of posting a video on December 10th 2023 showing him riding a scooter under the Eiffel Tower, on which the Star of David was being displayed in support of the Israeli people.
The order states that the young man made the “Tawhid sign, which involves raising the index finger towards the sky to affirm the unity of Islam” followed by a “middle finger to the Star of David”. In his appeal, the young man acknowledges that the video was “clumsy” but maintains that his intention was to “express support for the Palestinian people, not to incite hatred or violence”.
The Ministry of the Interior also referred to a decapitation video that a social media account attributed to the young man had allegedly posted, accompanied by a homophobic message. After being searched and taken into custody, Vincent Brengarth's client denied owning the account and filed a complaint for identity theft. His computer equipment was seized for analysis. Ultimately, no charges were brought against him. However, his appeal against the house arrest order was rejected on Thursday July 11th by the top administrative court the Council of State which used a particular form of procedure which did not require a hearing.
Even when house arrest orders target individuals who have been convicted, the profiles of some of the chosen individuals raise questions. This is the case with 'Pierre' – not his real name - whom Mediapart had already met in June 2021, when he had been subjected to a series of administrative measures.
His experience perfectly illustrates a phenomenon described by researcher Nicolas Klausser. “There is a form of self-generation of MICAS [orders] that generate offences, which in turn fuel the perceived threat posed by the individual,” he explains. “This could be someone insulting a police officer during their daily check-in at the police station or missing one of [these appointments].”
Initially, several factors drew Pierre to the attention of the intelligence services, such as his conversion to Islam, his biochemistry studies, and his passionate interest in the Syrian conflict, which led him to take part in online discussions with radicalised individuals.
These factors prompted the Ministry of the Interior to order an administrative search, which took place at 8am on October 27th 2020. Still half-asleep, Pierre was startled and grabbed a toy gun that he had kept beside his bed ever since being burgled. Summonsed for an immediate court appearance for threatening a public authority with a weapon, he was sentenced to eight months in prison, serving two months with the other six months suspended.
Door broken down
This conviction was used to justify Pierre being placed under a three-month MICAS house arrest order on November 20th, a measure that was renewed in February 2021. Pierre's assets were also subsequently frozen.
Since then, the young man has changed his life to a certain extent. He has moved home and left the Muslim faith. “I don't even have Muslim friends any more,” he notes. He no longer follows the Syrian conflict but does now keep a close eye on the war in Ukraine. He is also passionate about open-source intelligence, OSINT, something he does online with other internet users. However, he now takes certain precautions. “I'm not less active, but I am careful about the accounts with which I interact,” he says.
Yet, on the morning of June 6th this year, police once again broke down his door for a “home visit”. On June 24th, he was notified of a new MICAS order against him. This is despite the fact that no new allegations had been made against him. Since then, he has to report to the local police station every day at 8pm.
Today, I'm 22 years old, I work. I'm no longer a threat!
As for 'Kamel' – not his real name – he actually was convicted of a terrorist conspiracy. “It was in 2016. I was 14 and I did seven months in Fleury [editor's note, a prison in the Paris suburbs],” he tells Mediapart. At the time, he was part of a group of teenagers being indoctrinated via Facebook and Telegram by a jihadist who was trying to push them into committing attacks. “Because of him, dozens of minors were jailed,” Kamel says angrily.
“One day, he messaged me privately, asking me to carry out an attack,” Kamel continues. He adds: “Which I did not do and would never have done. I didn’t prepare anything, didn’t look for a weapon, nothing! But that was enough to get me convicted.”
“I haven’t committed any offence since then. I’ve stuck strictly to my probation obligations, my educational follow-up. All the reports on me have stated that I’m perfectly integrated. Today, I’m 22, I work. I’m no longer a threat!” insists Kamel, who has become a systems and network engineer and is set to start a master’s degree this autumn.
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In total, Kamel has heard of six MICAS orders within his circle. Two of them targeted friends from university. “One day, one of them was called by his boss to urgently replace someone at work. He went and therefore couldn’t check in [editor's note, with the police station under the terms of his house arrest]. He was immediately arrested, faced a summary trial, and was sentenced to three months in prison without remission. He didn’t even get to go home first,” Kamel says.
“This is someone who had just got married and bought a flat. And he was working on a history dissertation at the Sorbonne. Everything’s now ruined for him,” the young man says indignantly. “All because, in 2015, he threatened soldiers stationed outside a synagogue. It was totally stupid, but he was a kid! When a kid messes up, you scold them, you punish them. In this case it feels like we’ve become second-class citizens,” he says.
Kamel also talks about the impact of the measure on his social life, which has been “destroyed”, he says. “I told my friends I was under judicial supervision after a street brawl. Terrorism is something shameful,” he says. “There's a desire to punish,” Kamel believes, explaining that was how he felt during the hearing where his appeal, pursued by his lawyer Lucie Simon, was examined and rejected. “They had brought fifteen police officers for me,” he recalls.
Administrative justice isn’t doing its job.
This type of practice – the presence of so many police officers for an appeal - “allows a 'criminal law atmosphere' to be established in a procedure that is actually administrative”, explains Nicolas Klausser. More broadly, the researcher is struck by how “immigration law is infiltrating common law”. He explains: “House arrest has historically been used in immigration law to remove people. And [redacted intelligence reports] appeared in the 1990s, in the context of litigation concerning foreigners considered to pose a particularly serious threat to public safety. The MICAS system is imbued with this culture of immigration law.”
Meanwhile lawyer Vincent Brengarth says he is “appalled by the poor oversight of these measures” and announces that he has “written to the [state's] Defender of Rights” on this subject. “There's an imbalance in front of the administrative judge, who grants a presumption in favour of the administration,” the lawyer claims. “In 2016, there were some victories. But I don't hear of any [orders] being annulled now. And appeals are sometimes rejected without a hearing. Administrative justice isn’t doing its job.”
The scope of these MICAS orders granted ahead of the Olympic and Paralympic Games also raises questions about the criteria chosen by the Ministry of the Interior to select its targets. This ministry issues a MICAS order for every person who has previously been subjected to such a measure, while regularly adding individuals who in some cases have never been convicted. The danger is that, eventually, thousands of people could be subject to them.
“There's a risk that individuals will find themselves perpetually in the crosshairs and will be subjected to a MICAS every time there is a major sporting or cultural event or a G20 summit,” fears Vincent Brengarth. “I think that I will now be targeted every time there's a new threat from a terrorist organisation or a major event is organised,” says a worried Pierre. “All this because they put me in the wrong category.”
For Nicolas Klausser, this extension of the scope of administrative measures is explained by the low risk for the Ministry of the Interior in implementing them. “MICAS [orders] are quite easy to set up. Even if a house arrest in itself does not prevent an act, it doesn’t cost much; in case of appeal, it's approved by the administrative judges in 89% of cases and if, ultimately, the measure is overturned, it's not very serious for the administration.” In summary, concludes the researcher, it is “low-cost anti-terrorism”.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter