It is the most important police trial in a decade, one that threatens to expose the inequalities that still plague France’s high-rise estates. Two police officers will stand trial this week over the deaths of two teenagers who were electrocuted after running away from police in a Paris suburb in 2005, triggering the worst rioting in France for 40 years.
When housing estates across the country, from the Somme to Toulouse, rioted for weeks on end in 2005 – a period that saw the government declaring a state of national emergency after more than 9,000 vehicles and dozens of public buildings were and businesses were set on fire – it seemed that the state and justice system would be quick to act. But it has taken 10 years, and much legal wrangling on the families’ behalf, for the case to come to court.
On October 27 2005, during their half-term holiday, Zyed Benna, 17, and Bouna Traoré, 15, had been playing in a football match and were walking home for the evening Ramadan meal. When a police van, which had been called to a local building site, crossed their path, they ran. An inquiry concluded that they had not committed any crime, but that they had fled simply because they had seen police. The families’ lawyers pointed to the “absurdity” of kids running just because of the police, and police chasing just because they were running. The boys and their friend Muhittin Altun, 17, hid in an electricity substation. Zyed and Bouna were killed by tens of thousands of volts. Muhittin survived with severe burns.
The deaths triggered riots on the boys’ run-down estates in Clichy-sous-Bois, north of Paris, which soon spread across the country.
The two police officers now face trial on charges of “non-assistance to a person in danger” for allegedly failing to come to the boys’ aid. The police did not notify the French energy company EDF that the boys were hiding in the substation. The police officers’ lawyers have argued that they never thought the boys were in the substation. Much of the trial will hinge on a conversation between the two officers, one on the ground and one on the phone switchboard, and whether or not they discussed how dangerous the substation was. If found guilty, the police officers could face up to five years in prison and a €75,000 fine.
“To finally learn what happened and to understand,” was how Bouna’s elder brother, Siyakha Traoré, described his hopes for the trial at a press conference at the families’ lawyer’s office this week. He said the case would at last allow the families to grieve and would show that the boys’ deaths had been a wake-up call for the country.
“I think about it every day; since the accident, we have stopped living,” said Adel Benna, 39, one of Zyed’s brothers. “The wounds run so deep, they never healed.”
After the boys’ deaths, judges opened an investigation and recommended that the police officers face trial. But the state prosecutor, arguing that no crime had been committed, went to the appeal court and the case was dropped. The families fought on through higher appeal courts and the trial will now run for five days in Rennes, Brittany.
“Seemingly, certain people never wanted this case to be tried,” said the families’ lawyer, Jean-Pierre Mignard, at the press conference.
On France’s high-rise estates, youth workers are hoping that the trial, whatever its outcome, would go some way to healing the mistrust between police and young people that still plagues French tower blocks. As France comes to terms with the problem of homegrown terrorism in the wake of January’s terrorist attacks in Paris, which began with a massacre at the magazine Charlie Hebdo and ended with a bloody siege at a kosher supermarket, there has been a renewed focus on the grim realities of France’s ghetto estates, dumped on the outskirts of cities and rife with discrimination, joblessness and poverty. The Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls slammed what he called France’s “territorial, social and ethnic apartheid” and this month launched an action plan for more mixing in social housing and measures against discrimination.
But the strained relationship between police and ethnic minorities continues to be a problem, with the appeal court currently considering a landmark case brought by black and Arab men who say they were openly stopped by officers for no other reason than their skin colour.
At a demonstration in Paris on Sunday, Sihame Assbague, spokeswoman for the group Stop le Contrôle au Faciès which campaigns against police racial profiling, told the Guardian: “It’s very difficult to get justice in police cases today. We feel there’s a certain impunity … Everyone is watching this case very closely. Zyed and Bouna’s deaths shocked France. We just want to see justice.”