France wants Papon in prison
As Papon enjoyed his first full day of freedom, Jewish groups and other critics planned protests at the appeal court’s decision to free 92-year-old Papon on health grounds.
Justice Minister Dominique Perben said he has ordered a study to see whether the decision to free Papon can be reversed. He suggested the government might try to argue that freeing Papon was too traumatic for French society.
The release caused “a disturbance to the public spirit,” the minister said. “The line we are working on starts from the fact that this concerns a crime against humanity and that the notion of a disturbance to public order may create an opening.”
Perben said President Jacques Chirac was “moved” and “felt very strongly the emotion of those people affected by this affair.”
Frail but free, Papon left Paris’ La Sante prison just hours after the ruling. His release provoked heated debate. Critics said it insulted the memory of Holocaust victims. Others said France could not decently keep an aging, sick man in jail and appealed for the release of other ailing and elderly prisoners.
Papon was convicted in 1998 of complicity in crimes against humanity for his role in arresting Jews deported to Nazi death camps during the Second World War.
As second-in-command of the Bordeaux region for the Vichy regime that collaborated with France’s Nazi occupiers, Papon signed orders that led to the deportation of 1,690 Jews from 1942-1944. Most were sent to Auschwitz. Sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, Papon served less than three.
Papon was released under a new provision in French law that allows prisoners to be freed if doctors agree they are suffering from a fatal illness, or that their long-term health is jeopardised by imprisonment.
The three-judge panel that freed Papon said doctors decided his health was “incompatible with his remaining in detention.”
President Jacques Chirac had previously rejected three requests to pardon Papon.
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