Thread: French farmer to challenge jail term for aiding illegal migrants

French farmer to challenge jail term for aiding illegal migrants

A French farmer who aided hundreds of illegal African migrants on Tuesday said he would challenge the “over the top” four months suspended jail sentence by an Appeals Court.

Cedric Herrou, an olive farmer who says he aided and lodged as many as 3,000 migrants who crossed from Italy, was sentenced by an appeals court in the town of Aix-en-Provence in southern France.
Herrou said that he was doing a job that the state should be doing.

“They’re trying to silence me, it is over the top,” Herrou, whose activism has made him a household name with many friends and many detractors, told Reuters of the ruling.


“I am being told what I should not do but not what I should do.”
He said he would take the case to the supreme court to try to get the legal action against him annulled.

He also denounced what he called the state’s failure to live up to a humanitarian duty towards thousands of people fleeing war and strife.

Record arrivals of migrants from the Middle East and Africa remain a major concern across Europe, where political leaders are under pressure to reconcile humanitarian imperatives with voter worries about jobs and security.

Herrou ended up in court after ferrying hundreds of migrants from the Italian frontier to his home in the Roya Valley in 2016 and housing them in a makeshift campsite at a disused railway premises.


He also risks a second trial in a separate case where he is being pursued by state prosecutors who suspect him of helping migrants enter France illegally from Italy.

That affair follows his arrest with 150 migrants at a train station in the Riviera city of Cannes, not far from the Italian border.

He was also handed a suspended 3,000 euro (3,543.90 dollars) fine in February.

Migrants who successfully cross the Mediterranean sea from places such as Libya to the southern tip of Italy, thousands have died trying to do so in recent months, often go north to a place called Ventimiglia, from where they try to slip across the border into France.


The area is often described in the media as a “mini-Calais”, a smaller hotspot alongside the notorious Calais port city on the northern coast of France, where many migrants head in the hope of making a short sea-crossing to Britain.

Bulldozers razed an illegal campsite known as “The Jungle” in Calais November 2016 and dispatched thousands of migrants to towns and villages across the country pending processing of asylum requests.

The spot has seen several hundred new arrivals over the past few months.

A court recently ordered the French local and national authorities to provide migrants there with access to water after legal action by charities who accused the state of turning its back on a humanitarian crisis. (Reuters/NAN)

French farmer to challenge jail term for aiding illegal migrants

French Farmer Receives 4-Month Suspended Sentence for Helping Migrants on Border


riEUROPE17:00 08.08.2017

The French court of appeal in the country's southern city of Aix-en-Provence on Tuesday gave a French farmer a four-month suspended sentence for assisting migrants with slipping across the border from Italy, local media reported.

PARIS (Sputnik) – The court found Cedric Herrou guilty for "facilitating illegal immigration," the Franceinfo broadcaster reported.

Herrou, 38, along with some other people residing in the French-Italian border area, helped transport and shelter migrants, coming from Sudan, Eritrea and Nigeria via the Mediterranean Sea.Herrou helped about 200 migrants with crossing the border, using his own vehicle, and accommodating them in his farm in the Roya valley in Maritime Alps on France's southern border with Italy, according to the French authorities.

Commenting on the matter, the farmer said as aired on the French television that he "did not regret anything," stressing that it was his civil duty to act where the state was failing.

In February, Herrou was handed a 3,000-euro ($354) penalty by a correctional court in Nice, which, nevertheless, suspended an eight-month prison term for the activist.

French Farmer Receives 4-Month Suspended Sentence for Helping ...