• On the night of 25 to 26 October 2014, Rémi Fraisse, a young botanist, was killed by a grenade in October during a demonstration against the Sivens dam project.
  • In November 2021, the Administrative Court of Toulouse had recognized "the responsibility of the State without fault", condemning him to pay compensation to the family of the young man for moral damage.
  • This conviction has just been confirmed by the Administrative Court of Appeal which, as in the first instance, rules out "the existence of a fault committed by the police".

On the night of 25 to 26 October 2014, Rémi Fraisse, a 21-year-old botanist, was killed by a grenade shot during a demonstration against the Sivens dam project in the Tarn. In March 2021, the Court of Cassation had confirmed the dismissal of the case against the gendarme behind the shooting, indicating that the use of force had been in accordance with the law.

In parallel, the family of the young man had seized the administrative court of Toulouse to recognize the responsibility of the State. What the judges had done in November 2021, indicating that it was a "no-fault liability of the State", but condemning it to compensate "the beneficiaries of the victim for their moral prejudice up to a total amount of 46,400 euros".

A decision that the Administrative Court of Appeal has just confirmed. "The court held, like the Administrative Court of Toulouse, the no-fault liability of the State on the basis of Article L. 211-10 of the Internal Security Code, which recognizes the State civilly liable not only for damage resulting from crimes and offenses committed, by open force or by violence, by gatherings or gatherings but also for those that may result from the measures taken by the public authority for the restoration of order", indicates a statement from the court confirming the amounts of compensation for non-pecuniary damage.

Fault committed by law enforcement removed

But like the administrative court, it "ruled out the existence of a fault committed by the police, who made use of the weapons at their disposal in a gradual and proportionate manner to the violence to which they were subjected, without necessarily being aware of the potential dangerousness of offensive grenades in exceptional circumstances".

Our file on the sivens dam

In 2021, Me Claire Dujardin, lawyer for Rémi Fraisse's family, hailed "an important victory, a necessary step in the fight of Rémi's family who has constantly demanded truth and justice", before stressing that "for the first time, the State is condemned as part of a law enforcement operation led by gendarmes that resulted in the death of a person". The Toulouse lawyer, however, deplored that the court had retained "the fault committed by the victim to exonerate the State of its responsibility up to 20%, because of a culpable recklessness".

An argument of the court taken up by the Administrative Court of Appeal which "took into account the fault constituted by the recklessness of the victim, who deliberately went to the scene of the clashes". And to add that it "weighed this recklessness by the impossibility for the victim to have been aware of exposing himself to a risk of death because of the use of an offensive grenade, then deemed non-lethal, a risk that was realized only because of quite exceptional circumstances".

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  • Sivens Dam
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