On the scene of the attack in Paris on December 2, 2023. DIMITAR DILKOFF / AFP
After the attack that occurred in Paris on Saturday, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, denounced on Monday, December 4, on BFMTV / RMC, that there had been a “failure [in monitoring] psychiatric” of the suspect. “Doctors, on several occasions, considered that he was getting better and that he could, if I dare say, live freely. (…) There is someone who is mentally ill who no longer takes his [treatment] and who carries out the action,” he declared, also considering that “the services of the Ministry of the Interior [had] done their best.”
The suspect in the attack, in which one person was killed and two others were injured with a knife and a hammer, had spent four years in prison following a conviction for a violent action plan at La Défense (Hauts-de-Seine). He was also subjected to “follow-up” psychiatric care, without hospitalization, which expired in April 2023 after successive reports from the coordinating physician did not conclude the need to resume medical monitoring.
On Monday, the Minister of the Interior reiterated his desire to create an “administrative injunction” parallel to the judicial injunction, which currently allows a judge to mandate medical monitoring. To date, “the prefect cannot request, (…) force someone to present themselves to psychiatrists to find that this person, obviously, is not doing well; that is what should be changed, it seems to me,” he said. According to Mr. Darmanin, around “30% of people monitored for radicalization have psychiatric disorders; (…) that’s a lot of people.”
On the other hand, the government spokesperson, Olivier Véran, had stated on Monday morning on RTL that the suspect’s “medical, administrative, and criminal” path was “in line with what had been prescribed and with the state of the law.” Like Mr. Darmanin, the spokesperson considered that his actions raised the question of the “adaptation of law”: “These obligations have been fulfilled and, nonetheless, he was able to kill. So should we strengthen the law in order to prevent this type of tragedy from reappearing someday? For example, there is the question of extending care injunctions when it comes to people who combine psychiatric illness and radicalization.”
Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally (RN), fumed on Sud Radio, “A follow-up to do what? (…) Do you think that changes anything? There are profiles in our society. We can put all the efforts in the world to reintegrate (…), I think the place for these people is in prison.” Mr. Bardella again argued for the strengthening of security detention, a mechanism allowing the placement in a medico-judicial center of defendants who have served their sentence but are considered to be very dangerous. “For several years now, we have been proposing [its] systematic establishment for acts related to terrorism,” said Mr. Bardella, who led the far-right party’s European parliamentary election list in June.
“The RN has the ability to analyze before the facts; they have answers to all the questions we still have,” criticized the government spokesperson on RTL. “If the doctor indicates that the patient no longer presented any danger, that he no longer presented any signs of decompensation, and if the individual, when he was monitored, did not show any symptoms indicating that he would act: liberties, security, all that is in tension,” he explained, recalling that “the presumption of his departure [to engage in jihad] had been sufficient criteria for his imprisonment for four years.”
In 2021, a law extended the duration of the injunction for treatment upon release from prison, from three to five years – which the RN did not vote for, reiterated the Minister of the Interior. “I don’t want the debate on radical Islam to be concealed behind that of psychiatric instability,” insisted Mr. Bardella, on Monday.
“Terrorism mutates and exploits weaknesses in our system,” also said Mr. Darmanin, referring to the suspect’s radicalization on the internet even as he claimed the opposite, and neither surveillance nor monitoring of his communications allowed it to be detected. Asked about the possibility of new terrorist attacks, especially during the Paris Olympics in 2024, the minister said he had “this apprehension every day, every night” even though he “knows that there are policemen, very courageous intelligence services who prevent many attacks.”
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“Security that is put in place for the Olympics, like the security that was put in place for the Rugby World Cup, is security that makes sure that all the events likely to bring together crowds are events in which you will not have any risk of coming across individuals like him,” for his part, assured Mr. Véran. “Everything is being put in place to prevent attacks during the Olympics, but we do not think in terms of the Olympics, we think in terms of daily life for the French.”
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