Fire tests gold, suffering tests brave men.

Seneca

Five years after the Sapin II law was passed, what about ethics within justice?

Françoise Nicolas’s case is symbolic in terms of legal costs to be paid by the whistleblower. As a civil servant employed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, she explained to me that since the summer of 2015 the consequences of her situation as a whistleblower have come in many different forms and led to numerous procedures. Since she suffered the physical attack, the former diplomat has spent over 50,000 euros in solicitor’s fees. However her case has come up against the ‘reasons of state’ even though no-one in her administration has disputed the existence of the fictitious expenses which she disclosed. She certifies that she has lost everything before the different courts, which each time held motives that left her helpless and incredulous. Here is what this civil servant wrote to me in February 2017 about her experience with the French justice: “I failed to obtain the withdrawal of my administrative file of defamatory documents written by the Ambassador shortly after my arrival because the Administrative Tribunal of Paris judged in 2011 that the fact of writing that I went drunk to the office because I was a ‘single woman who could not stand the living conditions in Africa’ was not insulting. Consequently, it was of little importance to demonstrate the false character of these allegations. The Council of State validated this analysis”.

Photo : Françoise Nicolas, personal collection

“I was automatically transferred to Nantes in 2010. In 2011, the Administrative Tribunal in Paris judged that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had acted ‘because of the consequences of the incident on the relations between France and Benin’, thus validating the defense of the administration by invoking the personality of my attacker, protected by her lover as she had a child out of wedlock. The lover was then the brother-in-law of the Beninese Head of State Yayi Boni and had made a very formal appeal to his high ranking relations. The Council of State had also validated this decision. Not a single magistrate would even report the serious anomalies: absence of an investigation, dismissal of the cleaning agent who had saved my life and has not been auditioned, incontestable demonstration of the production of false documents by the administration, such as a false job description etc”.

“In 2016, the ‘reasons of state’ was again accepted by the Administrative Tribunal in Nantes to reject my requests for an administrative investigation and for functional protection. My case has become even more absurd as since 2011, Yayi Boni divorced his wife and is no longer the Head of State (which was the reason for applying to the ‘reasons of state’). Therefore, the lover of my attacker is only now the former brother-in-law of a former Head of State. During the public hearing in court I had the opportunity, for the first time, to speak about the context of the internal reporting of these “serious accounting and legal malfunctions” relating to empty files which had however been financially charged. I have never been listened to. The Court has rejected my requests based on the ‘general interest’ relating to the personality of my attacker”.

This forthright woman, worn out by years of fighting in the courts, continues to describe to me the number of important obstructions she is confronted with:

“In 2011, a first criminal complaint was filed in France. My lawyer at that time voluntarily undermined the facts making sure that this would lead to a faster investigation. It is not so. On the contrary, from 2011 until 2014, the ‘investigation’ was characterized by a certain number of obstructions: nobody was able to explain the reasons why my file was blocked twice in one year in cities located in the south of France. The three hearings were very basic. Nobody was astonished by obvious inconsistencies. It would take the intervention of Elisabeth Badinter to the Public Prosecutor in Rennes in July 2014 to see the last act: he closed the case without further action through lack of evidence”.

“In 2015, I filed a new criminal complaint against persons unknown for attempted murder, with civil proceedings for damages at the Tribunal Grande Instance in Nantes. Even though I am financially depleted the bond was set at one month of my salary which further aggravated my financial situation. The investigating magistrate validated the attempted murder