The Lille expulsion commission did not follow the advice of the prefect of Hauts-de-France, Georges-François Leclerc, who came in person to the court on September 13 to plead the expulsion to Algeria of Sana (the first name modified at her request), a young woman forcibly taken to Syria in 2014 by a radicalized mother and returned with her two children in January.
In this publicized file, Georges-François Leclerc explained that Sana constitutes a “serious threat” for public order. The opinion unfavorable to this expulsion, made public on Wednesday September 27, is contained in a few lines. The commission, attached to the Lille court, justifies this by the fact that “the allegations of Mr. Prefect (…) are not corroborated by any evidence. She concludes, after the hearing and study of the file, that the prefect “does not provide proof that she maintains relationships with people who would be involved in terrorist actions” and specifies that “since his repatriation by the French authorities, no reprehensible act can be blamed on him”.
The commission also underlines, as lawyer Marie Dosé did at the hearing, that since her return to France, Sana has not been indicted nor placed under the status of assisted witness and that she “has been the subject of administrative control and surveillance measures that have since been lifted”. A way of saying that anti-terrorism specialists, little suspected of levity, did not see in Sana a convinced jihadist nor a potential terrorist. She was repatriated by the French authorities, along with her daughters, from the Al-Roj camp in Syria where they had been interned after the fall of the Islamic State organization in 2019.
A non-binding opinion
In law, if it had been established that she constituted a threat, Sana could be deported, not having French nationality. Born to foreign parents in France, she could have applied to be naturalized before reaching the age of majority but, she explained, her mother, who raised her in an extremely strict Islam, was opposed to this. The young woman is the mother of two little girls born in Syria from her marriage to a Belgian jihadist who has now disappeared, a marriage whose “it cannot be excluded (…) that it was imposed on him”, notes the commission. At the end of the hearing on September 13, the prefect observed that there was nothing to prevent these little girls, placed by child welfare upon their arrival in France, from being expelled with their mother to Algeria. . A country where neither mother nor daughters have ever set foot.
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