France debates future of Papon

PARIS, France -- Convicted Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon has become the centre of debate in France as lawyers and politicians discuss his future in prison.

Debate has focused on whether 90-year-old Papon should be kept in jail to continue serving his sentence for helping to organise the transport of Jews to death camps during World War II.

Papon's lawyers appealed to the European Court of Human Rights last week for his release, charging that his incarceration violated the European Convention on Human Rights ban on inhuman and degrading treatment.

Former Socialist Justice Minister Robert Badinter, whose father died in a German concentration camp, has supported Papon, saying there was no point in keeping him in jail.

"We speak of crimes against humanity. There is a point where humanity must prevail over the crime," said Badinter, a Jewish intellectual best known for abolishing France's death penalty in 1981 within months of becoming justice minister.

Papon, supervisor of the pro-Nazi Vichy regime's regional Office for Jewish Questions in southwest France during World War Two, was found guilty in April 1998 but he fled to Switzerland.

He was eventually sent back to France to begin a 10-year sentence and will be 94 when eligible for early release in 2004 after completing half his sentence.

Lawyer Germain Latour, writing in the daily Liberation, argued that Papon and his legal advisers were to blame for his being in jail at such an advanced age, as they had used legal loopholes to delay his trial for nearly 20 years.

Labour minister Elisabeth Guigou, who was justice minister at the time Papon was sentenced, said: "If we ask the question about Papon, we must ask it about all aged convicts and convicts suffering from incurable diseases and who are dying."

Before his wartime record was exposed in 1981, Papon had risen to become budget minister in a national cabinet after a controversial term as head of Paris police during the Algerian War.

CRIF, the umbrella body for France's 750,000-strong Jewish community, said of Badinter's involvement in the controversy that "he only represented himself."

Gerard Boulanger, lawyer for families of victims sent to death camps by Papon, was especially scathing about Badinter saying, "He did not lift a finger (to put Papon on trial) when he was justice minister."

Badinter was a close friend of the late French President Francois Mitterrand, who openly admitted he delayed the trial to avoid reopening wartime wounds.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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