A French miscarriage of justice - as yet "unproven"

For the time being Loïc Sécher will remain behind bars.

That was the decision of a commission of judges (la commission de révision des condamnations pénales) on Monday, which decided that more evidence was required before he could be released.

It said that "additional information was needed" and at the moment it didn't have all the elements that would justify suspending Sécher's sentence or setting him free.

In other words he's not as he, his lawyers and even the legal team of his "victim" had hoped, being released and his original conviction hasn't yet been overturned.

Instead the wheels of French justice are moving just as slowly as ever in reaching a decision that many - barring the system itself - seem to think is the right and just one.

Secher has been in prison since December 2003, serving a 16-year sentence for a crime he claimed he never committed and one which the alleged victim said earlier this year never occurred in the first place.

To recap the previous story that appeared here, Sécher was found guilty of raping a 13-year-old girl in the 2000 in the village of La Chapelle-Saint-Sauveur in Loire-Atlantique in western France.

His accuser - now 22 years old - came forward in April this year, and in a letter to France's chief prosecutor, retracted her original claims that he had raped her. Sécher, she wrote, had not raped her, and her conscience no longer allowed her to live with the knowledge that an innocent man was sitting in prison.

French law allows Sécher's legal team to resubmit a request for the sentence to be overturned, which is exactly what one of his lawyers, Yann Choucq, intends to do.

"Asking for his (Sécher's) release on the current evidence doesn't appear to be unreasonable in my opinion," he said. "I still hope that he'll be freed soon and his honour restored."

That's also a hope echoed by Cécile de Oliveira, the lawyer for the 22-year-old woman. De Oliveira said that the commission's latest decision was also a blow for her client, and told reporters that as far as she was concerned, the retraction should have been enough to ensure Sécher's release."

"My client has clearly expressed her wish that Sécher be released from prison, and I think that's entirely compatible with further investigations," she said.

"She will also suffer from this latest decision and was shocked and had been expecting a decision that would lead to his release."

Sécher's committee of support, which numbers 150 people, was also disappointed by Monday's decision, and is still hoping that this latest decision will be reviewed, especially in the light of last week's release of Marc Machin, falsely imprisoned in 2004 for a murder he didn't commit.

"Justice takes its time and is very careful (in overturning a judgement)," said Jean-Pierre Chesné, one of the committee members.

"We wish that it had shown the same caution before accusing and sentencing Sécher in the first place."

Concern grows over missing girls' disappearance

When 11 year-old Sophie and her 13-year-old sister Valérie, left their father's house in Rheims in northeastern France on Monday morning, he apparently thought they were going off to school.

But they haven't been seen since and instead, a message they left behind saying they would rather take their own lives than be forced to return to their mother, has led police to launch a search for them.

The sisters are at the centre of a custody battle between the mother, who lives in Italy and the father, who lives in France.

The accusations made by both parents are contradictory and confusing, with the only fact certain in the case being that the two girls have not been seen or heard from for nearly five days and neither parent apparently knows of their whereabouts.

The girls were born in Italy and when their parents separated in 2004, it was the mother, Katia Navigante who was given custody of them and their older sister (now 16) by an Italian court.

The father, Rénaldo Gualtieri, says that although he had visitation rights, he wasn't allowed to see his daughters very often and they weren't even permitted to call him.

He maintains the girls were mistreated and threatened by his former wife and her new partner, and that he had a report from Italian social services which confirmed that Navigante put pressure on the two girls to remain quiet.

Gualtieri, said in an interview this week that it had been for the sake of his daughters that he had brought them to France in July 2007 and not as claimed by their mother a case of "abduction."

"It wasn't a kidnapping. It was for their own good because they couldn't put up with the violence and threats by their mother any longer," he said.

The mother though gives a rather different interpretation of what happened. When the girls were taken by their father, she applied to an Italian court to have them returned.

That request was granted and upheld by an appeals court in Rheims. Navigante arrived on Sunday - the day before the girls were due to be handed over - to collect her daughters.

The next day they went missing leaving only the letter behind.

"We prefer to die rather than to return to Italy. Please forgive us."

For Navigante it's clear that her daughters are being hidden somewhere, and she told French television that she didn't believe the girls had "disappeared".

"All of this is a conspiracy, a plot " she said looking at the letters "They didn't write those words of their own free will."

"I have plenty of letters from them and I can tell that these haven't been written with their hearts.

"I think they're being hidden so that they can't return with me.

Navigante's lawyer, Sylvie Dumont-Dacremont, says the children have been put under pressure by their a father they love as much as they fear.

That accusation and the suggestion that he has somehow engineered the disappearance of his daughters has angered and upset Gualtieri.

"I don't know how anyone could say such things," he said. "But in the end, anything can be said as the only thing that matters to me is to find my daughters and be assured of their well being."

Gualtieri offers no explanation as to why the French court upheld the Italian judge's decision to return the two girls to their mother apart from saying that the ruling hadn't been in the best interests of his daughters.

While the police continue their search for the two girls, Navigante has filed an official complaint with the public prosecutor against Gualtieri, accusing him of kidnapping.

Jacques Brel - Belgium's most famous son remembered (updated - see end)

On Wednesday a little bit of music history will go under the hammer at Sotheby's in Paris.

Personal memorabilia of the late Belgian singer, Jacques Brel, will be up for auction, including some of the most intimate souvenirs charting the life and work of the man.

And among the treasures will be a little yellowing exercise book containing the first draft of the lyrics for one of his best-known songs, "Amsterdam". Its guide price is €50,000.

Brel - for those who you who aren't familiar with the name - is arguably one of the greatest French-language songwriters of the last 50 years.

His work has often been described as "brooding", "dark" and "deep" and at the height of his success in the 1960s and 70s he composed songs that have more than stood the test of time and influenced many who followed.

Along with his contemporaries, Georges Brassens and Serge Gainsbourg, he was widely and critically acclaimed and considered as one of the outstanding songwriters of his generation.

His songs have been covered by countless (Francophone) artists and Brel even made a name for himself in the English-speaking world.

Brel died of cancer at the age of 49 in 1978 and Thursday will mark to the day the 30th anniversary of his death, with television, radio and press tributes both here in France and in Belgium.

And on the eve of that anniversary comes - as far as his family is concerned - the untimely auctioning off of some of his personal effects.

Concert posters, records, personal memorabilia, manuscripts and guitars are among the objects up for sale, and they've been on show in the run up to the auction since last weekend.

The majority of the items coming under the hammer on Wednesday are from the house he shared in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in southern France during most of the 1960s and 70s with his partner at the time, Sylvie Rivet.

She died in 2002 - and it's her nephews and nieces (she had no children) who have decided to put everything up for sale to the highest bidder.

Brel's family (his former wife Thérèse Michielsen, nicknamed "Miche", now in her eighties and his three daughters, Chantal, France and Isabelle) is far from happy that the auction is taking place at all, and the middle of his daughters, France, tried to prevent the break-up of the collection and keep it in the family by proposing an undisclosed sum beforehand.

The offer was rejected.

She's in charge of Editions Brel, which looks after the Jacques Brel foundation as well as much of the copyright and his musical legacy. And she had some harsh words to say about the auctioning of her father's personal effects and the fact that she thought Rivet's relatives seemed more interested in making money than the importance of what her father had left behind.

"One day Jacques walked out on a woman and went to buy a packet of cigarettes. He never returned," she is quoted as saying.

"When that woman died, her relatives discovered an enormous number of things that they're now putting up for auction.

"They're going to sell manuscripts that will end up in a safe or in a drawer. That's deplorable."

The auction is expected to raise between €340,000 and €470,000 with that small yellowing exercise book containing the original manuscript to "Amsterdam" being the most sought after.

But other items include a poster from 1965, when he played New York's Carnegie Hall and was billed as "The Popular French Singer" giving rise to Brel's rather tart retort "it's not easy being Belgian."

There's also a recording of the last concert he held at Olympia in Paris in 1966

Although Brel died in Paris, he is today buried on Hiva Oa one of the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia - his home for many years - in the same cemetery as the French painter Paul Gaugin.

And it was on Hiva Oa that a flying club - Brel was also a passionate pilot - has recently been opened bearing his name.

Even if you neither speak nor understand a word of French, click on to the two videos accompanying this piece and listen to a couple of haunting, but beautiful songs, "Ne me quitte pas" and "Amsterdam".

I know that probably counts as an opinion - but I challenge anyone to argue otherwise.


Ne me quitte pas




Amsterdam




Update Thursday October 9, 2008

The auction surpassed the expected €340,000 - 470,000 total, with the whole collection going for a whopping €1.27 million. And that at a time when the financial markets are nosediving!

The manuscript for "Amsterdam" alone fetched €110,000.

The reaction from Brel's widow; "It's an inheritance - not something that should be sold. It's a shame and rather embarrassing."