FRANCE: Faced with public outrage over the release of the 92-year-old convicted war criminal Maurice Papon, the French Justice Minister, Mr Dominique Perben, yesterday initiated proceedings to send him back to prison.
Papon left La Santé prison on Wednesday, hours after the Paris Appeals Court said he should be freed because of ill health. He returned to his two-storey villa at Gretz-Armainvilliers, outside Paris. But his sleep was interrupted by a dozen militants from the Jewish Defence League who clanged casseroles under his windows before dawn yesterday.
Last night, the Union of French Jewish Students planned to read, outside Papon's house, the names of all 1,560 Jews deported under Papon's orders in 1942 and 1943, starting with infants and old people. The Interior Ministry has dispatched 32 policemen to protect Papon day and night.
The Communist Party called a protest meeting at the Vélodrome d'hiver, where Jews were brought for a mass deportation in July 1942. The Human Rights League and Communists were to hold another rally at Bordeaux's Saint-Jean train station, where convoys organised by Papon departed for Drancy en route to Nazi death camps.
Mr Perben's attempt to overturn the release is the latest step in a 21- year-old judicial saga. Even as the public prosecutor began building a case to overturn the Paris Appeals Court decision, Papon's lawyers announced they would demand a retrial to clear him.
Papon's "arrogance, contempt and refusal to express regrets or remorse" made many detest him, far beyond his victims, Le Monde said. The Catholic newspaper La Croix asked that Papon and his lawyers "show a minimum sense of decency and not take advantage of this clemency to continue seeking an unacceptable rehabilitation."
Mr Didier Schuller, a Gaullist politician who was briefly jailed with him, said Papon was "obsessed with his own rehabilitation . . . until his last breath, he will struggle to make his cause heard. He is not at all a beaten old man; he is totally determined."
President Jacques Chirac three times refused Papon's request for a pardon, and Mr Perben noted yesterday that "the President of the Republic felt acutely the emotion of those directly concerned by this affair." It was "in this state of mind" that the government had acted.
Because Papon was convicted of complicity in crimes against humanity "the notion of threat to public order" might provide grounds for overturning the release.
There is widespread resentment, expressed on radio talk shows and Internet forums, that Papon was freed because he is rich and could afford good lawyers. Medical reports describing him as an invalid have come under question. "I didn't see Maurice Papon leave La Santé in an ambulance," the former justice minister, Mrs Elisabeth Guigou, said. One doctor had described Papon as "bed-ridden" but Mr Schuller said he walked for an hour every morning in the prison corridors.
He was given a larger than average cell, with four skylights. Most prisoners have only a hard piece of foam rubber to rest their head, but Papon was given proper pillows and a bell to summon guards at night.
Clearly frustrated, former Health Minister Mr Bernard Kouchner, who championed the law on freeing ailing convicts that allowed Papon to be released, complained that his generous law had been misused to help a man who showed no generosity to his victims.
The new law, passed only last March, was meant to help convicts with life-threatening illnesses such as AIDS or cancer to get proper treatment unavailable in a normal prison, he said.
"We have been trapped by our own generosity," Mr Kouchner, best known for promoting medical aid in war zones around the world, told Europe 1 radio.