Two years after the riots that shook New Caledonia, a general dismissal of charges was ordered by the Parisian investigating judges in favor of the Kanak activists of the CCAT, including the independence leader Christian Tein, suspected of having incited the violence.
Opened in 2024 on site, the judicial information on the Field Action Coordination Unit (CCAT), at the origin of the mobilization in the Oceania archipelago, was relocated to Paris in January 2025. Fourteen people, including Christian Tein, were indicted in this case.
The investigating judges dismissed the accusations of insurrection, raised for a time during the investigation. They stressed that “even though the claim tended to ultimately obtain the independence of the territory, it was not intended to ‘endanger the institutions of the Republic'”, nor to take the territory “by attacking the French State by force of arms”.
“Christian Tein’s defense salutes the considerable work of the Parisian investigating magistrates who have just given him justice,” commented his lawyers, Messrs Florian Medico, Pierre Ortet and François Roux. “After a transfer of 17,000 km in undignified conditions, pre-trial detention for almost a year far from his family, political attacks and false accusations, a defense step by step to demonstrate his total innocence, Christian Tein is completely exonerated, like the others,” they salute. “It is obviously a great satisfaction, but also the astonishing observation of an initial action which aimed to muzzle a politician,” they add.
“All defense lawyers are delighted with this excellent news. We bet that the investigating judges in Paris would be able to tell the truth, prove the innocence of our clients and we were right. A beautiful demonstration of what a rule of law is,” said François Saint-Pierre, lawyer for Frédérique Mulavia, one of those indicted.
Transfer of Kanak activists denounced
In the spring of 2024, New Caledonia experienced a wave of riots, one of the most serious crises in its history, leading the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, to declare a state of emergency. The violence, linked in particular to the plan to thaw the electoral body, left 14 dead and caused more than two billion euros in damage.
In June 2024, a wave of arrests targeted the CCAT, an “organized structure made up of order-givers and executors” then suspected by the courts of having developed a plan to “destabilize economic units, administrations and state services” on the archipelago. The targeted members of the CCAT were suspected of having put in place “real logistics (…) through the recruitment and mobilization of rioters, the targeting of objectives and the collection of material means (firearms, incendiary devices, surveillance equipment) and communication” (walkie-talkies, drones, etc.).
Among the charges: complicity in attempted murder of a person holding public authority, organized theft with a weapon or participation in a criminal association. But the investigating judges considered that there were no “sufficient charges” against the 14 indicted, ruling that there was no reason to prosecute anyone. Christian Tein, 58, was, for example, accused of theft and destruction of banks, supermarkets and restaurants “arising from the action plan” of the CCAT.
A sign of the tension around this case, 12 defense lawyers denounced in February in a letter to the investigating judges the fate of their clients. They particularly protested against “the unacceptable conditions, constituting inhuman and degrading treatment” in which the seven Kanaks had been transferred to mainland France, citing “exceptional judicial treatment” due to “government interference”. They spoke about this as a “failure” and a “state crime”.
They had thus cited a crisis meeting, immortalized by a France Télévisions documentary on the action of Gérald Darmanin when he was Minister of the Interior: he deplored that “not a guy goes to prison” after the arrests of rioters, while Gabriel Attal, Prime Minister, said: “If there could be a few examples, that would be good. »
