An unprecedented legal marathon began at Vatry airport in eastern France on Sunday, hearing about 300 Indian passengers on a flight grounded for three days by authorities on suspicion of human trafficking.
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The four mobilized judges are running out of time: they have only two days to see all the passengers who are presented to them, including the 303 people locked in the reception hall converted into a waiting area for foreigners, and then 24 hours of overtime to decide her fate.
“The aim is to be able to see everyone,” Châlons-en-Champagne prosecutor Annick Browne told AFP on Sunday.
This major event on Christmas Eve, which also mobilizes lawyers, clerks and translators, is mandatory under French law.
In such cases, the border police may not detain a foreigner in the waiting zone for more than four days. Only a judge can extend this period initially by a maximum of eight days and then, in exceptional cases, by a further eight days. However, the last passengers placed in the waiting area were there on the night from Thursday to Friday.
11 unaccompanied minors
The hearings are being held in a building next to the hall, with white tarps placed around it to avoid prying eyes, an AFP journalist noted on Sunday.
The 303 Indians had been confined to Vatry, a small airport near Reims, 150 km east of Paris, to reach full capacity since Thursday evening, a few hours after their plane, an Airbus A340 operated by Romanian airline Legend Airlines, landed .
The flight was originally scheduled to connect Dubai (United Arab Emirates) with Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. But the technical stopover turned into a long immobilization after an “anonymous report” said passengers were “probably victims of human trafficking,” the Paris prosecutor's office said on Friday.
According to a source familiar with the matter, these Indians, presumably workers in the United Arab Emirates, may have planned to go to Central America and then try to enter the United States or Canada illegally.
According to the Paris public prosecutor's office, eleven unaccompanied minors were among them.
Extended police custody
Two police detention periods that began on Friday were “extended by a maximum of 48 hours on Saturday evening,” the Paris public prosecutor's office told the AFP news agency, “in order to check” whether the role of the two people affected “could have been different.” .” from that of others.
According to a source familiar with the case, ten asylum applications were also submitted late Saturday afternoon.
After three nights there, “it will certainly be long” and “absolutely frustrating,” recognizes Patrick Jaloux, president of the civil protection department of the Marne department, where Vatry is based.
To keep themselves busy, the passengers, who speak partly Hindi and partly Tamil, “make a lot of phone calls with their families” and “play with each other” in the disaster control playgrounds, he says.
The prefecture of Marne says that single beds, toilets and showers, as well as a “family zone” have been installed to ensure the privacy of parents and children.
The thirty crew members affected by either the Dubai-Vatry or the Vatry-Managua route have been “granted permission to leave freely,” assured AFP Liliana Bakayoko, who claims to be a lawyer for the airline.
According to the specialist website Flightradar, Legend Airlines is a small company whose fleet consists of four aircraft.