The 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.
The decree ratifying the creation of the data files was signed by prime minister Élisabeth Borne on April 6th and published the following day in the official gazette, Le Journal official.
It is estimated that there are around 330 minors who have been returned to France from the Middle East where they once lived with their parents within terrorist communities, principally those of the Islamic State group which, beginning in 2014, captured swathes of territory in both Syria and Iraq.
Article 1 of the decree signed by Borne in April sets out that the purpose of the data files, which are grouped under the French acronym MRZOGT, is to “allow a better coordination of the relevant services [involved] in the administrative, judicial, medical and socio-educational care of minors who have returned from the operational zones of terrorist groups, with a view to ensure their protection and to provide against them engaging in a process of delinquency or radicalisation”.
The files are to be managed by the government’s Inter-ministerial Committee for the Prevention of Delinquency and Radicalisation (the CIPDR), and will involve the participation of the ministries of the interior, justice, education, and health. Article 5 of the decree lists ten administrations which will have access to the MRZOGT data, and which are also expected to contribute to the information collected. Three others are entitled to receive information about the minors whose care they are involved in.
Following the issue of the decree, a prominent French human rights NGO, the Ligue des droits de l’homme (LDH), submitted a legal challenge against the database, in a petition filed before France’s Council of State, the country’s highest administrative court, which has yet to rule on the case. The LDH argues that the “sensitive” information that the database contains can be accessed by a “wide variety of actors”, affecting the rights of the children in question in an “unjustified and disproportionate” manner.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Meanwhile, senior French prosecutor Jean-François Ricard, the head of the anti-terrorist branch of the public prosecution services, the PNAT, has allegedly refused to associate his services to the MRZOGT operation, describing it as labyrinthine and pointless, sources have told Mediapart.
Contacted by Mediapart, the PNAT gave a diplomatically worded statement that said it did not have access to the MRZOGT “insofar as the judicial responsibility in educative assistance for minors who have returned from operational zone of terrorist groups is not within [the PNAT’s] competence”. When subsequently asked whether Ricard had in fact refused to associate his services with the new data file system, the PNAT told Mediapart that it would not answer the question.
While the decree establishing the files states that the information they contain will be kept until the children reach their majority (currently at 18 in France), there is no restriction on the age from which a child can be included in the data. In theory, a two-month-old infant can be put on the monitoring list after their arrival in France.
France’s independent watchdog for ensuring public rights and freedoms are not infringed by data processing, the CNIL, issued its advisory opinion on the MRZOGT database on November 3rd 2022, when it was still a project. The CNIL underlined that “given the limited number of minors concerned, and the nature of the data processed”, the MRZOGT could not provide a guarantee on ensuring the public anonymity of the children it monitors. The watchdog also voiced its concern over “the risks that the information exchanged […] be transmitted to people who are not bound by professional confidentiality”, and that “this information provides for an excessive period of storage”.
According to sources, the design and development of the database, with the provision of different rights of access to it according to the administrations wishing to use it, cost around 2 million euros. The control of access to the MRZOGT system is primordial given the exhaustive amount of information it is to contain. This includes a child’s civil status, address, details of their eventual birth in the Syrian-Iraqi region, about their siblings, their spoken languages, parents’ addresses and their judicial records including whether they are the subject of criminal proceedings or a prison term and their eventual release date, the conditions in which the minor arrived in France, including, where relevant, the name of the airport, and also detailed information about their scholarity.
All of which raises the question as to whether this costly database system, which the public prosecution services’ anti-terrorist branch apparently regard as pointless and which contains measures that potentially run counter to an individual’s rights, was worth developing. All the more so given that the surveillance of minors returning from Syria is already operative within a framework established in 2017 and involving different administrations, including the intelligence services – and which are not included in the MRZOGT system.
Cited by the CNIL, the Inter-ministerial Committee for the Prevention of Delinquency and Radicalisation, under whose auspices the system would operate, argued that one of its purposes was to ease the tasks of public child protection agencies in charge of looking after the revenant minors, and that it aims to “reduce the difficulties in coordination between the relevant services”.
French lawyer Marie Dosé, who has for several years led a high-profile legal campaign for the repatriation to France of jihadists’ wives and children detained in camps in Syria, told Mediapart that the decree ratifying the MRZOGT database was “disgraceful, shocking and dangerous”. Around 300 of the minors were returned to France from the region last year, followed by a further 32 in January, after the French government had initially stonewalled the issue.
“How will these children live knowing that they are placed on file and knowing that society believes it is legitimate in providing against their delinquency or their radicalisation with such methods?” she asked. “We are the only country to do that, the only one which refuses to consider these children for who they are; victims of their parents, but also of their country, which preferred to see them die in the camps rather than repatriate them.”
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse