Chad sentences French to hard labour

Chad sentences French to hard labour

uk.news.yahoo.com

N'DJAMENA (Reuters) - Six French aid workers were sentenced to eight years of hard labour each after a court in Chad found them guilty on Wednesday of trying to kidnap 103 children from the African country.

France, while calling the verdict a "sovereign decision", said it would ask Chad to implement a 1976 bilateral judicial accord which would allow the convicted six to be transferred home to serve jail sentences in their own country.

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Slipped under the radar this one - an `aid charity` have been found guilty of kidnapping not 1 or 2 - but at least 103 children but there entire defence was

They testified they believed the children were orphans from Sudan's war-torn Darfur region whom they intended to give to European families for fostering. They said international law justified the humanitarian operation.

`They believed.

so in the name of `charity` they abducted these children to be sold , sorry , fostered away.

they got caught and have 8 years hard labor - and yes they will do *some* before any legal process gets under way.

uk.news.yahoo.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

I'm surprised the sentences were already meted out; the trial only started last week. Now that's swift judgment!

This whole affair reeks of a certain kind of naive French leftist arrogance, personified by the "soixante-huitards" (the student revolt that pushed de Gaulle from office in '68) and their spiritual inheritors. It relies heavily on the myth of French exceptionalism and also upon the presumed superiority of these people and their values, and also upon a general French distaste for doing heavy-lifting, whether it be physical work or serious research into a given question--like were these children really orphans? And do we have any proof other than some stories given by guardians in a refugee camp? Might we want to do some actual research before trying to "save" them?

Simply because of the narcissistic nobility of their purpose--to save these Darfur refugees and bring them to France (like celebrities like to take terminally ill children to Disney World), this group, "the Arc of Zoe," thought it didn't have to bother with the scut work of actually documenting the question of whether these over 100 children were orphans or not, and blithely ignored the rule of law in Chad, which they obviously believed was little more than just another failed African state fallen into anarchy and backwardness.

Well, so there you have the result. A real morality tale.