Benalla case: a police union wants an instruction outside Paris

Collusion between the Élysée and the Parisian judges in the Benalla case ? This is what the Vigi police union, civil party, assumes in this file. In a letter sent Thursday to the Attorney General of Paris, Catherine Champrenault, the lawyer Yassine Bouzrou thus claims the disorientation of judicial information opened after the violence committed by the former project manager on 1^er May 2018, Place de la Contrescarpe. This request, registered in the code of penal procedure, amounts to asking that the instruction be treated by other magistrates than those of the district court of Paris. The public prosecutor's office has eight days to respond.

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To support its claim, the union denounces state intervention in the appointment of the Paris public prosecutor, Rémy Heitz. In question, the meeting made by Édouard Philippe in the summer of 2018 with two of the three potential candidates for the position. “The Prime Minister would have assumed with a media “to have intervened”, with the president, wanting “to be certain” that he would be “perfectly at ease” with the new prosecutor of Paris”, denounces one. And to add: "It is reasonable to think that the fact that the public prosecutor does not allow the investigating magistrates to investigate these facts is intended to prevent in-depth and complete investigations from being carried out within the framework of This folder."

"Malfunctions"

The lawyer for the union, a minority in the profession, also reports various anomalies and "dysfunctions" in the procedure. For example, access to the file would have been refused to Vigi for five months, despite its civil party status. Its members could not therefore have had “knowledge of the elements of the procedure”. Their request to audition Emmanuel Macron's former special adviser, Ismaël Emelien, would also have remained unanswered. “It is impossible for this procedure to be handled calmly and it is imperative that it be referred to another jurisdiction,” he summarizes.

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Finally, Vigi calls into question the intervention of the director of cabinet of the Élysée, Patrick Strzoda by the Senate inquiry commission, on January 16. The latter had affirmed that Alexandre Benalla would be heard in the "next days", "next hours" in the case of diplomatic passports. What happened, while the official was not supposed to know. "This demonstrates that there is real-time communication between the Paris public prosecutor and the office of the President of the Republic on current cases," said Yassine Bouzrou.

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What is judicial dismissal?

In the penal code, modified by a law of 1993, expatriation may be requested “on grounds of legitimate suspicion” vis-à-vis the court, “for public safety” or “in the interest of the proper administration of justice”. Clearly, most often, to protect the judicial institution from too strong external pressures or when actors in the judicial system are implicated. Only the Court of Cassation can remove the case from one court in order to seize another. The trivialization of politico-judicial affairs in recent years has put an end to this once systematic procedure. However, the request for a change of scenery remains commonplace. She had been accepted into the Bettencourt affair, but refused for those of Mediator et clearstream.