The Archives of Maître Paturel — Part 1

The archives of Maître Paturel

Part 1

About a thousand pages, gathered into 70 files, were sent to us at the beginning of 2006 by Christian Paturel.

He is the lawyer and writer who, after 10 years of struggle and pleading, was finally restored in his rights on 22 December 2005 before the European Court of Human Rights, in a case that pitted him against UNADFI.

We contacted him in order to relay his testimony, exemplary and carrying hope for the future of spiritual freedom.

Given his availability and the trust he very quickly showed us, we asked him whether he could fill some of the gaps in our knowledge of the history of anti-cult movements in France.

In response, we received part of his archives as a defender of individual liberties, more precisely, those relating to CICNS’s purpose.

To dive into these archives is to discover, or rediscover, a wealth of testimonies and facts that most often inspire disgust, dismay or fear, but which have the virtue of shedding light on what is happening today in France under the name of the “fight against dérives sectaires”.

Below, we invite you to read the documents which, in various respects, touched us most.

“Abduction and confinement of children by the French justice system”

Extract from file 33: An article from Libération of 20 July 1993

This article reports the “cancellation of the placement” of 33 children by the Lyon Court of Appeal. It briefly recounts the massive and simultaneous arrest, in 12 different places, on 9 June 1993, of 50 adults and their children belonging to the network of communities.

Those 33 children were thus separated from their parents for 7 weeks. The article tells us that, as of its publication date, 38 other children were still being kept in placement under the authority of the children’s judge of Aix-en-Provence, where the families were demonstrating daily to demand their release. The article finally reports that numerous acts of police violence were recounted during the arrest (“doors smashed in”, “a woman dragged by the hair”, “children torn from their mother’s breast”) and that the cameras of Antenne 2 accompanied the gendarmes.

Maître Pesenti represented ADFI, civil party against “the cult”.

The expert reports were signed by Doctor Abgrall.

Following the trail of this edifying case, one discovers that roughly 150 children were wrongfully and brutally separated from their parents, and that they all had to undergo interrogations and gynaecological examinations, only to be finally returned to their parents for lack of evidence for the alleged charges of “aggravated procuring”, “indecent assault” and… “unlawful confinement” (sic).

The prosecution was therefore narrowed to “inciting minors to debauchery” (the old name for “corruption of minors”).

It appears that of the 23 adults who faced this charge, only one was ultimately given a suspended sentence and lost custody of his children to his divorced wife. In any event, 22 were definitively and finally acquitted in January 1999.

Many members of “La Famille” (The Family) decided, following this case, to leave France.

Despite the evidence of their errors, in a Libération article of 15 January 1999 reporting this final dismissal, the civil party, ADFI, branded the decision a “catastrophe” and asserted that the investigating judges’ 5 fruitless years of searching for evidence should be set against a statement by the gendarmes, who remember the unpleasant impression they felt during their sweep: “The people of the Family seemed informed of our coming.”

Thanks to the reasoning of these ADFI representatives, we are thus to understand that these people supposedly had connections in the gendarmerie or the judiciary, and decided to wait for the gendarmes (instead of going elsewhere that day) in order, presumably, to let their children benefit from the administration’s social services.

Such an attitude might have been understandable if the people of the Family had wanted publicity around the persecution and the suspicions that have pursued them for nearly 30 years. The fact is that no trace of any such publicity can be found anywhere. This case is almost absent from the Internet, except for the anti-cult sites which persist, despite the dismissals and the evident abuses of procedure, in parading charges and suspicions that they themselves initiated, as though they had the value of proof.

They condemn groups to suffer their vindictiveness in perpetuity. The outcomes of trials change nothing in their conviction. For them, a minority spiritual movement that is acquitted is a cult that managed to deceive the courts.

To learn more about “La Famille”: the testimonies heard by the Belgian parliamentary commission of inquiry:

http://www.dekamer.be/FLWB/pdf/49/0313/49K0313007.pdf pages 230 to 243 and page 329

Other parts of the dossier:

Part 2: The blunders of the Gest-Guyard report

Part 3: caricatures and dark designs

Part 4: The Horus case and that of the conscientious objectors.