MARCH OR DIE!

Helping a Foreign Legion veteran avoid the gendarmerie.

“March, or die! (Marche, ou crevé!)” is one of the mottoes of the Foreign Legion. The Legion is an elite French military formation with a century and a half of tradition, recruited from foreigners. One of its soldiers was my client, who turned to me for help. He had been in France for several years – after his service – and was unable to come to Poland to visit his parents. This restriction was the result of a mistake he made years ago: before joining the Legion, he had not been awarded with the permission from the Polish Minister of Defence. This, in turn, under the then inapplicable 1969 Criminal Code, constituted a serious offence and was punishable by imprisonment. The client had been wanted at his parents’ place of residence by soldiers of the Military Police for a long time. He feared that he might be stopped at the airport and arrested if he arrived in Poland.

I was given the task of ‘straightening up’ the client’s legal status, at worst by giving him a relatively lenient sentence so that he could serve it and enjoy peace of mind. The case appeared to be an interesting challenge. It boiled down to proving that the Client’s crime from years ago – although formally subject to a criminal provision – indeed featured no social harm to the extent requiring punishment: both due to the passage of time and to the fact that, in view of both Poland’s and France’s presence in NATO structures, the Client’s service in the ranks of the French army could not now be considered a threat to the security of the Republic of Poland.

Formal issues also proved to be a challenge. Due to a number of reorganisations of the military justice system over several years, the military prosecutor’s office that conducted proceedings against the client was abolished. The rules relating to the jurisdiction of military prosecutors “taking over” cases after the abolished units were not clear enough. Not only that, but in 1998 a new Penal Code came into force, transferring responsibility for such cases from the military part of the Code to the general part (and thus from the jurisdiction of military prosecutors’ offices to the jurisdiction of ‘civil’ prosecutors’ offices. However, it was not clearly regulated whether investigations initiated years ago by military prosecutors’ offices were to be carried out by general prosecutors’ offices. Finally, I managed to file a request for discontinuance of the proceedings to the military prosecutor with a functional jurisdiction. The investigation was discontinued many years after it had been opened, and the retired lieutenant client was finally able to return to his country after many years and enjoy – his regained freedom of direct contact with his parents. The weary gendarmes were finally able to return to their barracks.