Strasbourg ruling allows appeal by French war criminal Papon

The convicted French war criminal Maurice Papon was wrongly denied an appeal because he had fled abroad, the European Court of Human Rights ruled yesterday.

The ruling means that Papon, 91, who has served three years of a 10-year jail term for organising the deportation of French Jews to Nazi death camps, will probably have his conviction reviewed by the highest French appeal court. An application by Papon's lawyers for his immediate release was rejected by a French judge yesterday.

Although the European judges in Strasbourg ruled that Papon had an "unfair trial", their judgment did not question his conviction in Bordeaux in 1998 for "complicity in crimes against humanity". They ruled only that it was wrong for the French courts to have rejected his appeal in 1999 after Papon failed to surrender himself to the hearing. He was granted €29,000 (£18,000) in costs.

Papon, who was a senior official in Bordeaux during the war and rose to become Paris police chief and finance minister after the war, fled to Switzerland rather than risk the confirmation of his conviction and 10-year sentence.

Under a French law, which was repeatedly condemned in Strasbourg and has now been repealed, anyone appealing against a prison sentence had to surrender themselves to jail on the day before their hearing or the appeal would be rejected automatically.

When Papon fled to Switzerland in 1999, the Cour de Cassation, the highest French appeal court, refused to hear his case. Papon was later captured and taken to the Santé prison in Paris, where he is still serving his sentence.

Opinions were mixed in France yesterday on the significance of the ruling. Papon's lawyers said the judgment "clearly revealed that Maurice Papon has been lying in jail illegally for three years". His conviction was "illicit", they said, because he had not been given the due process of an appeal to a higher court.

Representatives of Papon's Jewish victims minimised the importance of the ruling. They said it was based on a "technicality" and did not question his original conviction. None the less, it now seems certain that the Cour de Cassation will have to hear the appeal that it refused to take three years ago.