French charity workers may return home

Published Dec 28, 2007

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N'Djamena - Six French charity workers jailed in Chad for attempting to kidnap 103 children were to return to their home country on Friday to serve out their sentences, officials and lawyers in the case said.

"I have responded favourably to the transfer request from France this morning (Friday)," Chadian Justice Minister Albert Pahimi Padacke said. "Nothing now stands in the way of their departure."

The members of L'Arche de Zoe (Zoe's Ark) charity, sentenced to eight years' hard labour, were to leave the country Friday, judicial sources told reporters. French prison agents had arrived in Chad on Thursday.

All six were convicted on Wednesday of attempted child abduction for having tried to fly 103 children out of Chad to France, claiming they were war orphans from the Sudanese region of Darfur which borders eastern Chad.

International relief workers had determined that almost all the children were Chadian and not war refugees from across the eastern border, and that all had at least one living parent.

The court also sentenced a Chadian and a Sudanese who had worked with the charity as intermediaries to four years in prison in connection with the disputed operation on October 25.

The eight convicted were ordered to pay 4.12 billion CFA francs to the families of the children caught up in the affair.

They had all protested their innocence.

Eric Breteau, the head of the French charity who sometimes led his own defence in court, said the organisation had been lied to by intermediaries about the status of the children.

The case had raised tensions between France and Chad, a former French colony, as Paris prepares to spearhead a 3 500-strong EU peacekeeping force in eastern Chad to protect refugee camps in the region bordering Darfur.

Lawyers in the case complained of political interference, a charge first provoked when French President Nicolas Sarkozy on November 4 flew to Chad to bring home three French journalists and four Spanish air hostesses who had initially been charged in the affair.

Two days later, Sarkozy riled Chadian political and judicial authorities by saying he would collect the others, "whatever they have done".

The affair also prompted concerns over the sometimes murky world of adoptions by Western couples of children from developing countries.

The UN children's agency Unicef has said it was working with the Chadian government to ensure stricter controls on charities after the Zoe's Ark affair in order to restore trust in international aid workers.

France's justice ministry announced on Thursday that a request had been lodged for its citizens to serve their time in France.

The two countries signed a judicial co-operation agreement in 1976 providing for the repatriation of their country's citizens convicted in the other country, if the person concerned agrees and their country makes the request.

In France, there is no forced labour and further legal proceedings there will be needed to determine how to adjust the sentences accordingly.

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