The row over French database to monitor jihadists’ children returning from Syria
The French government has introduced a controversial national database for monitoring the evolution of children born to jihadist parents and who have been returned to France from camps in Syria. The system, officially described as ensuring the “protection” of the minors and to prevent them “engaging in a process of delinquency or radicalisation”, contains very sensitive personal information about the children, and can be accessed by a wide range of administrations. It has come in for sharp criticism from rights campaigners, and faces a legal challenge before the Council of State, France’s highest administrative court, while Mediapart has learnt that the public prosecution services’ anti-terrorist branch has declined to participate in it. David Perrotin and Matthieu Suc report.
TheThe French government has introduced a database system to monitor the personal evolution of minors born to French jihadist parents and who have been returned to France from Syria, where many were held with their mothers, or alone, in detention camps following the military defeat of the so-called Islamic State group in early 2019.
