An Algerian national in France who raped a child has been granted refugee status after claiming he would be persecuted in his home country due to his trans identity.

The criminal, referred to in court documents as Medhi F., was convicted of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old minor in 2019 and sentenced to four years in prison, Le Journal du Dimanche (JDD) reported. In addition, Medhi F. was supposed to be deported from France.

But in 2020, Medhi applied for asylum from the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (OFPRA), claiming he couldn’t return to Algeria because he would face persecution as a trans-identifying male. OFPRA refused his request, citing a section of the French code that states that refugee status can be refused or terminated if the person asking “has been convicted in France … either for a crime or for an offense constituting an act of terrorism or punishable by ten years’ imprisonment, and his presence constitutes a serious threat to French society.”

Mehdi appealed his case to France’s National Court of Asylum (CNDA), which in 2023 overturned the OFPRA decision. The CNDA maintained that Medhi needed to meet two conditions to be excluded from refugee status: A conviction and posing a threat to society “on the date of the decision,” JDD reported.

The CNDA decided that the conviction was indisputable but that Mehdi no longer posed a threat to French society, writing that he had “voluntarily committed himself from the start of his detention to numerous treatment protocols and professional integration procedures that justified the reduction of his sentence, that he had obtained in 2021 the judicial lifting of the additional sentence of banishment from the territory pronounced against him, that he had expressed regrets and a desire for social and professional integration, and that he benefited from psychiatric monitoring and associative support.”

A psychiatrist in 2022 also determined there was “no evidence supporting the hypothesis of a possible recidivism,” though it is unclear how the psychiatrist made that determination.

OFPRA disagreed with CNDA’s decision and took the case further to France’s Council of State, the country’s highest court for cases involving public administration. On July 15, 2024, the Council of State ruled in favor of CNDA, stating that convictions “cannot in themselves legally justify a decision refusing or terminating refugee status” and that “the time that has elapsed and the entire behavior of the person concerned since the commission of the offenses” should be taken into account.

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OFPRA appealed the Council’s decision, but it was upheld on Monday, with judges ruling that Mehdi – who is currently doing some form of transition – is correct to fear persecution in Algeria for his trans identity, and the fear is serious enough to grant him refugee status in France, JDD reported.