France’s armed forces regularly enter into financial compensation agreements with innocent victims, or in the worst cases their relatives, of military actions abroad. The exact amounts paid by the public purse, and their numbers, are held secret, even to Members of Parliament. Justine Brabant has written a book on the subject, and in this report, updated with new details, she recounts the degrading haggling that victims are subjected to, the less than noble motives behind the often derisory damages awards, and how the taking of an innocent woman’s life in the African state of Chad was valued at 35 heads of cattle.
Former conservative French sports minister Roselyne Bachelot, who has become a television talk show personality in France since leaving office, has been ordered by a Paris court to pay 10,000 euros in damages to Spanish tennisman Rafael Nadal, and was handed a suspended fine of 500 euros, after it found her public claim that he used doping drugs was unfounded.
French celebrity gossip magazine Closer has been ordered to pay 100,000 euros in damages to the Duchess of Cambridge for publishing pictures of her sunbathing topless while on holiday in Provence in 2012, a sum well below the 1.5 million euros that her lawyer had demanded.
The man from the south-east Riviera region, who is reportedly claiming 45 million euros in damages, alleges a bug in the Uber mobile application allowed his wife to track his movements on her mobile phone after he used it on one occasion to book a ride.
The Versailles appeal court ruled that Kerviel, who was previously ordered to pay back 4.9 billion euros he was accused of having cost the Société Générale in rogue trading in 2008, should now pay back just 1 million euros.
