The place to begin was a private revenge by an instructional who bought a suspended sentence of 4 months in jail for harassment
On 28 November 2023, simply after 6 a.m., a SWAT workforce of round 175 policemen sporting black masks, helmets, and bullet proof vests, concurrently descended on eight separate homes and flats in and round Paris but in addition in Good. They have been brandishing semi-automatic rifles, shouting, making very loud noises, crashing doorways and placing all the things the wrong way up.
For comparability, in late August 2024, the French anti-terrorism prosecutor’s workplace engaged about 200 law enforcement officials to hunt a suspect who had tried to set a synagogue ablaze within the southern French metropolis of los angeles Grande-Motte and brought on an explosion wounding a police officer and destroying a number of vehicles close by.
The November 2023 raids weren’t an operation in opposition to a terrorist or armed group or a drug cartel. It was a raid concentrating on eight personal locations primarily utilized by peaceable Romanian yoga practitioners.
Most of them had chosen to mix the nice with the helpful in France: to follow yoga and meditation in villas or flats kindly and freely put at their disposal by their homeowners or tenants who have been primarily yoga practitioners of Romanian origin and on the identical time to take pleasure in picturesque pure or different environments.
The primary goal of the operation was to arrest folks concerned in “trafficking in human beings”, “forcible confinement” and “abuse of vulnerability” in organized gang. The second goal was to avoid wasting victims of those unlawful actions however there have been no such victims.
About 50 of them occurred to be on the improper place on the improper time and had nothing to do with the search warrant justifying the operation. At any price, they have been victims of the police intervention as they have been stored in custody in inhuman and humiliating situations for 2 days and two nights, or extra in some instances, for interrogations. Human Rights With out Frontiers interviewed about 20 victims of the police raids and abuses, particularly in Villiers-sur-Marne, Buthiers and Vitry-sur-Seine. None of them and others was interviewed by the French media.
The Romanian yoga practitioners weren’t handled with the identical respect and humanity as Pavel Durov, the massive boss of the well-known social media Telegram, when he was arrested on the finish of August 2024, getting off his personal jet in Paris. After 4 days of police custody and interrogation, he was launched on bail regardless of 12 severe costs – little one pornography, complicity in all types of arms and drug trafficking for willfully failing to manage Telegram based on the French regulation. The authorities put him beneath judicial management on the threat of letting him escape because the Lebanese businessman Carlos Ghosn managed to do by concealing himself inside a big field shipped as freight on a non-public jet whereas he was beneath home arrest in Japan awaiting trial in 2019. Double requirements. “Relying on whether or not you might be highly effective or depressing, the court docket judgments will make you white or black…,” wrote the well-known French author La Fontaine in one among his quite a few fables.
The testimonies collected by Human Rights With out Frontiers in regards to the inhuman and humilitating situations of the custody of the Romanian yoga practitioners detained and interrogated by the French police after the November 2023 raids have been confirmed by a Canadian researcher: Susan J. Palmer, an Affiliate Professor within the Religions and Cultures Division at Concordia College in Montreal who can be directing the Kids on Sectarian Religions and State Management venture at McGill College. She revealed her personal findings after interviewing in Romania the yoga practitioners who had been arrested and stored in custody in France: The Police Raids Towards MISA in France: Conflicting Narratives – MISA College students Inform Their Stories – The Yogis’ Complaints About The Police – The MIVILUDES Behind The Raids.
The query raised by this paper is “What’s the origin of such a disproportionate police operation concentrating on yoga practitioners?”
On the origin, a college researcher sentenced for harassment in opposition to a feminine colleague
In response to the French media, the story of the widescale police raids concentrating on yoga practitioners began with a College of Angers medical researcher known as Hugues Gascan.
His peer-reviewed publications in scholarly journal reveals that he’s an esteemed scientist, mentioned Massimo Introvigne in Bitter Winter. A few of his earlier articles have been co-authored with a feminine colleague, P.J., and others.
At one stage, a dissent emerged between Gascan and P.J. about various therapies for most cancers and maybe different issues as properly. Gascan accused P.J. of being influenced by her participation in a “cult” led by a Canadian instructor of tantric yoga.
The battle within the laboratory grew to become so acute that the College of Angers in 2012 determined to shut the analysis middle the place each Gascan and P.J. had labored. Gascan now presents himself as a sufferer of a “cultic infiltration” into his laboratory however court docket data inform a special story.
His feminine colleague P.J. filed legal costs in opposition to him for “ethical harassment” and had him sentenced in first occasion, and on enchantment, and eventually by the Court docket of Cassation on Could 14, 2013, which confirmed the suspended sentence of 4 months in jail. The time period “harassment” was used 11 instances within the remaining judgment.
In response to the court docket selections, he additionally harassed different staff of his laboratory. A number of folks within the college testified that that they had personally been subjected to the same sample of denigration of their work, and to varied types of bullying which led to their isolation from the group and their removing from the division.
The judges famous as properly {that a} forensic psychological examination of P.J. had confirmed she was in psychological well being, and that even the governmental anti-cult company MIVILUDES, reported that no cultic deviances had been recognized” in her conduct.
This expertise appears to have developed a deep hatred of Tantric yoga teams in Gascan.
Gascan and MIVILUDES behind the large police raids
After this failure, Gascan declared battle on cults. In 2022 he created a small confidential anti-cult group of two individuals known as GéPS (Groupe d’étude du phénomène sectaire/ Examine Group of the Cult Phenomenon). This ‘group’ was nearly unknown till November 2023, has no web site and no public report of actions however browsing on the anti-cult wave in France simply attracts the eye of the media in a constructive means. It was a means for Gascan to bury within the sands of oblivion his judicial troubles and his suspended sentence of 4 months in jail, and to revive his private public picture.
He boasted in some French media, as Le Level and Good-Matin, that for 10 years he had investigated the actions in France of the Romanian Tantric yoga group MISA based by Gregorian Bivolaru who had been accused of utilizing it for sexual abuse. Furthermore, he claimed that he had offered testimonies and his analysis paperwork to the governmental anti-cult company MIVILUDES (Interministerial Mission of Vigilance and Fight in opposition to Cultic Drifts) however they by no means emerged in any trial. His thunderous declarations earned him the top of sure media shops in the hunt for sensationalism as “The person who introduced down MISA.”
In response to him, the then president of MIVILUDES, Hanène Romdhane, transferred his stories to Claire Lebas of the Cellule d’help et d’intervention en matière de dérives sectaires/ Help and intervention unit with regard to cultic deviances (Caimades) and from there to Main Franck Dannerolle, head of the Workplace central pour la répression des violences aux personnes/ Head workplace for the repression of violence in opposition to individuals (OCRVP). The consequence was the police raids of 28 November 2023 on eight separate homes and flats in and round Paris but in addition in Good, Gascan mentioned.
Whereas readers of French media are led to imagine that this operation was the results of a Sherlock-Holmes-like work by GéPS, the sensational tales and accusations that he shared with some journalists had been recognized for years by the French authorities. At this stage, the accusations of trafficking in human beings and sexual abuse of international girls have by no means been confirmed by any court docket choice in Europe.
Furthermore, two students have investigated the testimonies of so-called victims of sexual abuse and have highlighted their unreliability: the Italian scholar Massimo Introvigne in his guide Sacred Eroticism: Tantra and Eros within the Motion for Religious Integration into the Absolute (MISA) (Milan and Udine: Mimesis Worldwide, 2022) and the late Swedish scholar Liselotte Frisk in her analysis the case of Finnish girls claiming to have been victims
In Gascan’s public narrative, there was nothing new, besides the declare that in November 2023 a number of girls have been allegedly held captive in eight homes and flats in France to be sexually abused by Bivolaru.
Surprisingly for the 175 policemen sporting bullet-proof vests and armed with semi-automatic rifles, not one of the girls reportedly ‘liberated’ and interrogated by the police confirmed Gascan’s story however quite a few girls have been victims of abusive police custody in humiliating and traumatizing situations throughout which there have been severe breaches of the regulation as Human Rights With out Frontiers dropped at gentle all through interviews of about 20 feminine yoga practitioners.
Whether or not Gascan’s pretend story in regards to the alleged trafficking and detention of a number of international girls for sexual abuse in France actually influenced the MIVILUDES and the French judicial authorities within the choice that was taken to launch such an enormous operation discovering no sufferer will solely be verifiable if entry to key administrative paperwork of the MIVILUDES is granted to researchers.
