Victims of False Paedophilia Case Tell French Mps of Ruined Lives

Thirteen victims of one of France’s biggest postwar legal fiascos fought back tears yesterday as they told an independent parliamentary inquiry how their lives had been ruined by false accusations of child sex abuse.

L’affaire d’Outreau described by Jacques Chirac, the French president, as an unprecedented judicial disaster, prompted calls for far-reaching reforms after just four of the original 18 people charged in a pedophilia case in northern France were finally convicted.

Of the remainder, one committed suicide and 12 spent up to four years in prison, losing their jobs and marriages and, in most cases, seeing their children placed in care. In the end the woman who had accused them of sexually abusing her and at least a dozen other minors admitted in court she had made the charges up.

During yesterday’s hearings, shown live on television, the victims told how they had been humiliated, mistreated and held for months or years in jail despite inconsistencies in the evidence against them.

Alain Marécaux, a bailiff, said he was held in a cell with a bright light that was kept on all the time. "There was never any presumption of innocence," he said.

"I thought that surely in this country you can’t be held in prison for a month without proof."

He said his diary, which would have proved his alibis, was never consulted and no doubts were raised by magistrates when his accuser kept changing her story.

Karine Duchochois was in tears as she told the MPs she did not see her son for three years and that appeals for a second opinion were ignored after psychologists ruled the children’s evidence was credible.

Most of the criticism has focused on Fabrice Burgaud, the prosecuting magistrate in charge of the case, who has been accused of ignoring inconsistencies and evidence that exonerated the accused in favor of testimony by the woman at the centre of the case and her children. But Mr Burgaud told L’Express magazine this week that he felt "a profound injustice".

"I am in the position of the accused, even though I think I carried out my duties honestly and in accordance with the law," he said.