PARIS – The four young lawyers took the floor at a prestigious speech competition a few days after 130 people were killed in terrorist attacks across Paris in November 2015. They competed in the final round and struggled to clear their minds of the shocking images of the massacre they were seen playing on television.
If they win the match, from which an elite cadre of future public defenders is selected each year, they realize that they may eventually go to fight the cases of those charged with assault, they recently recalled.
“We knew we might have to get involved in this kind of case,” said Karim Laouafi, 39, who was drafting his speech at home when the attacks took place, one of them just a few blocks away. . “And sure enough, that’s what happened.”
More than six years later, Mr. Laouafi and three colleagues who took part in the 2015 competition – Merabi Murgulia, Léa Dordilly and Simon Clémenceau – spoke again. This time, they were in a courtroom in Paris to defend two suspects in the months-long trial of 20 men accused of involvement in the 2015 attacks. The verdicts are expected Wednesday night.
The coordinated assaults involved shootings and suicide bombings at the Bataclan Concert Hall, where most of the victims were killed; an area outside France’s national football stadium; and the terraces of cafes and restaurants in central Paris. The attacks, in which nearly 500 people were also wounded, were carried out by 10 Islamic State extremists, most of whom blew themselves up.
Salah Abdeslam, who appeared at the trial, one of the largest ever in France, is the only accused still alive who is accused of taking part in the attacks. The other accused were charged with aiding or abetting the terrorists.
Nearly half of the approximately 30 defense attorneys involved in the trial followed a similar path as their current roles. Everyone in their 30s graduated from “La Conférence”, an elite program that selects a handful of young lawyers from the speech competition each year and cares for them to become top public defenders.
As attacks carried out by Islamic radicals in France have increased over the past decade, youthful faces of La Conférence have become increasingly known on the benches of terrorist trials, giving rise to a generation of lawyers specializing in such cases.
She eventually defended a suspect in that trial.
Others have been insulted on social networks. “In people’s minds,” she said. Dordilly said jihadists are “indefensible.”
But the young lawyers defending the accused at the Paris attack trial (others represented some of the plaintiffs) shun the criticism leveled against them.
“At no time are we defending terrorism,” he said. Clémenceau said. “By staying a bit of a bulwark, by ensuring that every defendant receives a proper defense, we are also contributing to justice,” he added.
“We are here to protect our rule of law,” she said. Witt, who defended clients in 12 terrorism cases and counseled plaintiffs in the Paris trial. “We have somehow collectively become the barometer of counter-terrorism justice.”
Mr. Clémenceau and me. Dordilly, who defended a suspect in the trial, has been involved in dozens of such cases. This year, they defended the cousin of an Islamic State killer of a French priest, and they will be advising plaintiffs in the upcoming trial on a terrorist attack in Nice in 2016.
But dealing with terrorism was never part of the career plans of many of the young lawyers.
“They were immersed in it by La Conférence,” said Antoine Mégie, a political scientist at the University of Rouen in northern France who specializes in terrorism laws.
La Conférence, a two-century-old Ivy League-like club, is perhaps France’s most prestigious association of lawyers. Each year, he selects a dozen, all under 35, through a speech contest held in a magnificent panel library in the old Court of Appeal in Paris. The winners are automatically named as public defenders in sensitive criminal cases in the French capital – an invaluable career booster.
For the classes of the second half of the 2010s, when attacks on French soil escalated, joining La Conférence essentially meant being driven into a whirlwind of terrorist affairs.
“I suddenly realized it was going to be my daily life,” Ms Dordilly, 2016 class, said as she recalled her shifts at the courthouse, where she would regularly encounter armored police officers escorting blindfolded suspects through the hallways. .
It was there, in July 2016, that she first met Adel Haddadi, the person she met with Mr. Clémenceau defended in the trial which is due to end on Wednesday.
Each class of La Conférence from 2013 to 2018 was represented at the trial. Mr. Abdeslam is defended by a 2015 alumnus.
La Conférence, het mnr. Mégie said, “you have indeed trained an entire generation for terrorism issues.”
Unlike some of their famous predecessors at La Conférence – such as Jacques Vergès, who defended war criminals and dictators – the lawyers at the Paris attack trial say they tried not to politicize their work. Defending jihadism is not only unthinkable, it will not yield any results in a trial, they say.
But many were critical of the legal definition of “association of offenders with respect to a terrorist enterprise”, under which most of the suspects in the trial are prosecuted.
The jurists, along with some scholars, say that the definition could lead to the prosecution of individuals based solely on accusations that the accused knew they were interacting with a group that had terrorist intentions, even without giving details about those to know intentions.
“Hypothesis over hypothesis,” Adrien Sorrentino (La Conférence class of 2018) argued during the trial, referring to the so-called debt-by-association prosecutions.
In an interview, Mr. Sorrentino said being involved in the trial was a challenge for him and other members of his generation.
“In 2015 I was a young Parisian who became a lawyer and on the night of the attacks, as I was leaving a bar, I came across many people bleeding in the street,” he said.
“I could very well have been among the victims,” he added.
That disturbing rift haunted some of the lawyers, they said, especially when survivors testified.
“No one is leaving this trial unharmed,” he said. Murgulia told the court. “We drank the unheard-of sadness of the victims to drunkenness.”
His co-worker, mr. Laouafi, described the proceedings as “the trial of a generation”, noting that many of the lawyers, plaintiffs and defendants were between the ages of 30 and 45.
It was clear at the outset of the trial that some plaintiffs had struggled to understand the missions of the lawyers defending those accused of such heinous crimes.
But this month, after Mr. Laouafi defended his client, a group of plaintiffs accused him and Mr. Murgulia comes to see. “They told us: ‘At first we struggled to understand. Now we do, “Mr Laouafi said.
“That’s the best response,” he said.