FRANCE FOUND GUILTY OF TORTURE

Human Rights Court Rules For Dutch-Moroccan Drug Dealer

PARIS---France, a country that has proudly enshrined human rights since
1789, was ordered Wednesday by the European Court of Human Rights to pay the
equivalent of $100,000 to a convicted DutchMoroccan drug dealer for
violating his rights with police "torture" to make him confess.

France thus joined Turkey as the only two of the 41 members of the Council
of Europe to be found guilty of torture.

The human rights court sits on French territory in Strasbourg, and Justice
Minister Elisabeth Guigou suffered the embarrassment in silence when asked
for reaction by journalists.

The court found that Ahmed Selmouni, 57, had suffered heavy blows over
almost all of his body in "repeated and sustained assaults" over at least
four days of questioning by French police in the Paris suburb of Bobigny in
November 1991.

"Under these circumstances, the court was satisfied that the physical and
mental violence, considered as a whole, committed against the applicant's
person had caused 'severe' pain and suffering and had been particularly
serious and cruel," the decision said.

"Such conduct had to be regarded as acts of torture for the purposes of
Article 3 of the Convention," the court said, referring to the 1950 European
Convention on Human Rights.

Mr. Selmouni, serving a 13-year sentence in France's Montmedy prison, sued
the French authorities in 1992, asserting that he had been kicked, beaten
with a baseball bat to the point of losing sight in his left eye and raped
with a police billy club.

The unanimous ruling said the charges of rape and eye damage were not
substantiated by the medical reports available to the court, but it said,
"The Court also observed that the applicant had been subjected to a certain
number of acts which would have been heinous and humiliating for anyone,
irrespective of their condition."

French prosecutors took years to investigate Mr. Selmouni's complaints,
finally charging five police officers in 1997.

They were tried in 1998 for assault and "indecent assault committed
collectively and with violence and coercion," and last March 25, a criminal
court in Versailles convicted and sentenced four of them to three-year jail
terms, ordering the immediate arrest of their commanding officer, Bernard
Herve and giving him a four-year sentence.

The sentences were reduced and suspended by a Versailles appeals court on
July 1.