New Caledonia activist says France is impeding travel home after prison release

Original article by Aina J Khan in Montpellier

A pro-independence leader from the French overseas territory of New Caledonia has accused the French government of “deliberately dragging out” his passport application, preventing him from flying home after his release from prison.

Christian Tein, an Indigenous Kanak leader, was arrested in New Caledonia in June 2024 over allegations that he had instigated the deadly pro-independence protests that had taken place on the island a month earlier.

He was charged with various offences, including complicity in attempted murder and organised theft with a weapon, all of which he denied.

Tein was then flown to France, 10,600 miles away, on a private chartered plane and incarcerated until June of this year. In October, he was cleared to return home by a Paris appeals court after most of the charges against him were dropped.

However, Tein says he is unable to return because French authorities have not re-issued him with a passport.

“It’s been a while since I submitted my passport application,” Tein said in an interview in Montpellier. “But we can see that [the French government] are deliberately dragging it out.”

“A year in solitary confinement, it was very, very hard,” Tein said of his stint in prison. “Psychologically, you never come out of this kind of situation unscathed,” added Tein, who is now living in Alsace in north-east France. He remains under formal investigation for conspiracy and organised robbery, both of which he denies.

New Caledonia, also known by its Indigenous name, Kanaky, is a group of islands in the south-west Pacific Ocean about 750 miles east of Australia. Ruled from Paris since 1853, it is one of several overseas territories that remain an integral part of France.

In May last year, unrest and rioting erupted after Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to change voting laws to allow thousands of mostly white French residents who had lived on the islands for 10 or more years to vote. Kanaks – who make up about 41% of the population – said the proposal would permanently derail any hope for independence. Paris said the measure was needed to improve democracy.

Fourteen people – most of them Kanak – were killed in the worst violence on the islands since the pro-independence protests of the 1980s.

The French president responded by declaring a state of emergency, temporarily shutting down the borders and flying in thousands of military police. The prison in the capital, Nouméa, was partly burned down, so dozens of incarcerated Kanaks were transferred with little or no notice to the mainland.

At the time, Tein was the leader of the Field Action Coordination Cell, the pro-independence movement which had led calls for peaceful protests against the electoral law change. His arrest, as well as those of six other Kanak activists, caused protests to flare up again.

“Many in New Caledonia saw it as a ‘deportation’, like that of so many others in colonial history,” said Johann Bihr, of the International Prison Observatory.

Magistrates who questioned Tein concluded there was no proof that he was preparing an armed uprising against the New Caledonian government – the same government Tein was employed by and was forced to resign from because of his imprisonment.

“We have forgotten the values of human rights, the values that, when we charge someone, it’s based on evidence, on charges that are well-founded, but they did everything they could to isolate me from my country,” Tein said. “I hope that [the French justice system] will find the ways and means to clear us of this injustice that we have suffered.”

Macron’s planned voting law change was eventually scrapped and in July he announced an agreement known as the Bougival accord, which granted the territory more sovereignty but kept it under French control.

It was signed by some Kanak pro-independence figures. But Tein – who was elected president of the Kanak National and Socialist Liberation Front while in prison – was not among them. “We reject Bougival, but I need to be at the table to discuss the future of the country,” Tein said, alluding to his inability to return home.

Concerns have also been raised about the alleged mistreatment of other Kanak independence figures and activists.

Among the six Kanak activists flown on the private chartered plane to France with Tein in June 2024 was 31-year-old Guillaume Vama, a Kanak agroforestry expert who spent a year in a French jail in Bourges.

Vama said of his arrest that he initially thought he was being abducted by loyalists who wanted to remain part of France. A man armed with a machine gun ordered him to raise his hands, while another pointed a rifle at him and placed a hood over his head. “I thought my life was going to end,” he said.

He added that after being told by a judge that he was being transferred to France, he was handcuffed for 96 hours and struck on the knee by gendarmes, and did not receive any treatment for the injury while in prison.

“I felt completely dehumanised, treated like an animal,” Vama said of his flight to France. “To me, it was a clear message that the [French] state had no limits.”

Naïma Moutchou, France’s overseas territories minister, and Gérald Darmanin, the justice minister, have been approached for comment.

Urko Aiartza, a co-president of the European Association of Lawyers for Democracy & World Human Rights, said the delay to the issuing of Tein’s passport “may amount to an unlawful restriction on his right to freedom of movement”.

Tein’s legal team said the same administration that rapidly issued him with a temporary passport before being ordered to prison in France was now delaying the issuing of a new passport.

Until his imprisonment, Tein had never travelled to mainland France. “I always refused because I said I would come when my country was independent,” he said, laughing.

Asked about his plans if he makes it back to New Caledonia, he said: “I am 57 years old and I don’t think I have the right to pass this problem on to future generations. [Independence] is our only ambition.”