French Farmer Who Aided Migrants Says Court Might as Well Lock Him Up
Unlike the lower court in Nice, the appeals court also found Mr. Herrou guilty of illegally sheltering Eritrean migrants last October in an unoccupied holiday resort belonging to the national railway company,
and the appeals court ordered him to pay 1,000 euros, or about $1,200, in damages.
But the court found that in this case, which dates to 2016, Mr. Herrou had not simply provided humanitarian aid to migrants, and
that he had instead acted like a "militant" seeking to protest government policy by helping about 200 migrants avoid police checks, by smuggling them across the border and housing them on his farm.
The farmer, Cédric Herrou, an olive grower who lives in the Roya Valley in southeastern France, said after the sentence was handed down
that he would continue to help African migrants crossing from Italy to seek asylum in France, or to travel farther north to other destinations, like Britain or Germany.
French said that A four-month suspended prison sentence, why don’t they put me in prison directly, it will be simpler,
The court in Aix-en-Provence ruled that Mr. Herrou had gone beyond the scope of a 2012 law
that makes it legal for citizens to aid migrants on humanitarian grounds, according to a report by the Agence France-Presse, which observed the ruling Tuesday.
The government of President Emmanuel Macron is working on a proposal to speed up the process for asylum seekers in France and provide them with more temporary housing,
but it has also drawn a strict line between migrants it says qualify for asylum and those it says are coming for "economic" reasons.
8, 2017
PARIS — A French farmer who smuggled migrants across the Italian border was sentenced on Tuesday to a suspended four-month prison term in a case
that has shone a light on the government’s immigration policies.