The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Thursday, September 14, rejected the request of Kamel Daoudi, who denounced his house arrest since 2008, this 49-year-old Algerian having not exhausted all appeals to the French justice.
It “declares, unanimously, the request inadmissible” and “rejects it (…) for non-exhaustion of domestic remedies”, explains the court based in Strasbourg in a press release, specifying that “this decision is final”. The exhaustion of all procedures within national courts is in fact one of the conditions for entering into the judicial arm of the Council of Europe, which brings together 46 countries on the continent.
Kamel Daoudi was sentenced in 2005 on appeal to six years in prison and a permanent ban from the country for “criminal association in connection with a terrorist enterprise”. He had also been stripped of his French nationality.
Suspected of having prepared an attack
An alleged member of an Islamist group affiliated with Al-Qaeda, he was suspected of having prepared an attack against the United States embassy in Paris in 2001. In 2009, the ECHR, however, prohibited his expulsion due to the risk of torture in Algeria, the country he left at the age of 5.
Since his assignment, this former computer engineer says he has changed cities several times. Currently assigned in Cantal, he has brought several appeals before the French courts and has been rejected each time. But, as the ECHR specifies in its press release, “the applicant has not filed an appeal in cassation against the judgment of the Paris Administrative Court of Appeal of November 5, 2019”. Furthermore, “his appeal against the judgment of the Paris Administrative Court of Appeal of April 6, 2023 is currently pending before the Council of State,” adds the ECHR.
Karim Daoudi denounced before the Strasbourg judges the terms of his house arrest in which he saw “a measure depriving of liberty” which violated Article 5 (right to liberty and security) of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights. man, a text that the court is responsible for enforcing.
“We are breaking all records. He has been under house arrest for more than fourteen years! Mr. Daoudi must have clocked in 14,000 or 15,000 times. Who could still survive such treatment? », denounced Thursday on France Inter his lawyer, Emmanuel Daoud, before the publication of the judgment. “He can do nothing, he is imprisoned in the open and in a state of permanent assistance, without being able to provide for the essential needs of his family,” added the counsel whose client, married to a French woman, is the father of four French children living in Tarn.
Invoking also Articles 8 (right to respect for private and family life), 6 (right to a fair trial) and 13 (right to an effective remedy), Karim Daoudi complained of having been separated from his relatives and criticized the fairness of the proceedings he initiated before the administrative judge.
