A Frenchman reprieved after 18 years on death row in Indonesia on drug offences will have to serve 30 years in jail after being repatriated last week, a French court ruled on Wednesday. Serge Atlaoui's lawyer and his family are now expected to submit requests for a reduced sentence and a presidential pardon in the coming weeks.
"It’s a first success, a first step towards freedom," declared Serge Atlaoui's lawyer Richard Sédillot after the verdict, describing his client as "relieved" by the decision.
Sédillot said he could now lodge requests for both a softening of the sentence and possibly a pardon from President Emmanuel Macron.
"His ordeal can be ended, it will take a few more weeks," he said.
Under an agreement last month between both countries for his transfer, Jakarta has left it to the French government to grant him either clemency, amnesty or a reduced sentence.
The French judiciary emphasised it was not competent to judge the case itself after the rulings by the Indonesian authorities and could only convert the sentence into the equivalent French term.
Frenchman on death row in Indonesia leaves jail ahead of transfer home
The Indonesian ruling "is equivalent in French law to the production... of drugs in an organised gang, which is punishable by 30 years in prison," the court in Pontoise, north of Paris, said at the hearing on Wednesday.
Prosecutors had earlier said that the death sentence should be turned into a life term in France.
Atlaoui, a 61-year-old welder from Metz in northeastern France, has always denied being a drug trafficker.
Diplomatic pressure
He was arrested in 2005 at a factory in a Jakarta suburb where dozens of kilogrammes of drugs were discovered, with Indonesian authorities accusing him of being a "chemist".
The welder by trade said that he was installing machinery in what he thought was an acrylic factory.
An Indonesian court initially sentenced Atlaoui to life in prison, but the supreme court changed that to a death sentence on appeal in 2007.
The Frenchman was due to be executed alongside eight others in 2015 but was granted a reprieve after Paris applied pressure and the Indonesian authorities allowed an outstanding appeal to proceed.
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Atlaoui's return was made possible after an agreement between French Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin and his Indonesian counterpart, Yusril Ihza Mahendra, on 24 January.
In the agreement, Jakarta said it had decided not to execute Atlaoui and authorised his return on "humanitarian grounds" because he was ill.
Indonesia has some of the world's toughest drug laws and has executed foreigners in the past.
The death penalty was abolished in France in 1981.
(with AFP)
