Prosecutors have launched an investigation over racist comments written by some students at a college which trains France's future judges and prosecutors. The remarks were written on a private online document accessed by students who are about to graduate from the École Nationale de la Magistrature (ENM) in Bordeaux in south-west France. They included the phrases “France for the French” and “Arabs Out”. When informed about the comments the school's authorities referred the matter to prosecutors in the city who have now begun an investigation.
The probe comes on the eve of a crucial week for the 309 final year students – also known as “auditors” - who have just taken their final exams. On Monday April 26th the exam results for the future judges and prosecutors will be published. Where the students finish in the final rankings against their peers will give them an idea of where they are likely to be posted. Some legal jurisdictions around the country are not as prestigious and sought-after as others.
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However, though the final rankings will not be published until April 26th, each student received notification of their own individual scores on April 13th. So one enterprising student decided to create an informal ranking system on a shared online document. The idea was a simple one: the students would voluntarily and anonymously write their marks on an online spreadsheet and by doing so create an approximate version of the likely year rankings. A majority of the students – who began their studies in 2019 – took part in the project, with some 230 of the 309 final year students providing their marks anonymously.
The project seemed to have been a success. But within a few hours the behaviour of a few of the students had got out of hand and fellow students came across some worrying comments left on the online document. Some of these were schoolboy remarks, some were crude and of a sexual nature – and some were racist. These included “No but, Arabs out”, “France for the French”, “Vote Le Pen” - a reference to the far-right leader Marine Le Pen – and “oh, here we go, more scum”. A number of students quickly took screen grabs, warned other students about the comments and debated whether to inform the ENM's authorities.
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“When I went to visit the chart the next morning everything had been deleted but the creator of the document had added a warning,” one female student told Mediapart. This warning read: “Reminder: insults of a racist nature are not only an ethical breach of your future posts but are also a criminal offence.” But though the document had been cleansed of all racist comments by April 14th, some students nonetheless decided to raise the issue with the school authorities, using the screen grabs to prove what had happened.
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On Thursday April 15th the ENM's assistant director in charge of recruitment, initial training and research, Samuel Lainé, sent an email to all final year students. He reminded them of the oath they had all taken to “conduct themselves at all times as a worthy and honourable auditor of justice”.
Samuel Lainé continued: “Apprehension at a time when the rankings are published at the end of the academic year cannot permit and still less excuse practices which are not only contrary to the oath you have taken, to the ethics that form the basis of your legitimacy and the trust liable to be placed in you in the exercise of the tasks to which you aspire, but are also punishable under the criminal code. I therefore call on your sense of responsibility, on your sense of ethics, for these misguided acts to stop and for them not to happen again.”
He added: “I solemnly invite those who thought it apposite to proceed in this way to question themselves as to the resulting image of the school, and beyond that of the magistracy, if the information attached to this message were to spread outside the walls of this school.”
Though the school's management had reacted quickly, this message nonetheless frustrated many students who had been expecting a “stronger” response. “Many auditors in the year, including me, were shocked by this response,” said one student. “Management did not say that they were going to open an internal inquiry or to attempt to identify the authors of the racist remarks. I see this as a form of impunity. The author or authors of these writings are going to become magistrates [editor's note, prosecutors and judges] in a few weeks but can calmly make racist comments without risk of punishment.” The student added that some of his fellow students “know who the authors are but are keeping the names quiet to protect them”.
On Wednesday April 21st 132 of the final year students signed a letter to disassociate themselves from the comments and to put pressure on the school authorities. Their stated aim was to “encourage management to send out a stronger message and to show that there is no impunity”.
“We were shocked by the writings of a racist nature that were used as part of this project. We condemn in the strongest possible terms these comments, which were made by future magistrates,” the letter says. “Rather than taking responsibility for what they wrote and, for example, apologising, their authors have chosen to remain hidden. Digital anonymity does not absolve us from our oath. This should not be a place of impunity where it can be thought that the authors of such comments don't take responsibility for them. We won't accept that,” write the students.
The letter concludes: “We have taken careful note of the School's response to these events in an email on April 15th 2021 … We now expect full light to be shed on these events, for the authors to be identified, and all this to be done with complete transparency.”
However, the École Nationale de la Magistrature (ENM) denied to Mediapart that they had in any way been soft in the way they have handled the affair. Indeed, the prosecution authorities in Bordeaux confirmed to Mediapart that on April 15th the ENM management referred the issue of the racist comments to them under Article 40 of the criminal code, which obliges any public body that is aware of a potential crime to report it. An investigation was opened and handed the next day to detectives from the Direction Centrale de la Police Judiciaire de Bordeaux (DCPJ).
“We reacted in two ways simultaneously,” explained the ENM's Samuel Lainé. “The first was to remind the author or authors of these remarks that they gave an oath and that they also, as students, have ethical obligations. And that these aberrations are in complete contradiction with the school's values,” said the assistant director.
The second reaction was to refer the issue to the legal authorities so that they could identify the authors of the comments. Why had the ENM not told the students that they were doing this? “We didn't want to take the risk of providing the means to allow evidence to disappear. Our first objective is to ensure the potential identification of the authors,” said Samuel Lainé.
The ENM management is in fact counting on the investigation to be able to punish the authors of the comments before they take up a judicial or prosecution appointment in September. “If they are identified afterwards we will assess with the Ministry of Justice what can be done,” said Samuel Lainé, who said they could have “done without” this incident. “Unfortunately some will see this as the operation of a highly-politicised magistracy which doesn't respect society's laws. In their training, however, we repeat the importance of being extremely vigilant about that they say,” he said.
Indeed, it was only in December 2020 that the ENM highlighted the importance of its training during a hearing at the National Assembly in Paris into the “evolution in different forms of racism”. The ENM's coordinator of continuous training, Bertrand Mazabraud, told Members of Parliament at the time: “The School is particularly attentive to issues linked to racism and hate. That's why we have developed specific training on racism and anti-Semitism, and on the legal handling of hate speech.”
While they await the outcome of the criminal investigation, student representatives have asked fellow students to try to put the matter behind them and look to the future. “Though we are all shocked and distressed by this affair, we must now focus on the forthcoming major deadlines that await us,” they said.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter