PARIS — The four young lawyers took the floor at a prestigious speech contest a few days after 130 people were killed in terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015. They entered the final round and struggled to clear their minds of the shocking images of the massacre they had seen play on television.
If they won the competition, from which an elite cadre of future public defenders is chosen each year, they realized they might be arguing over the affairs of those accused of carrying out the attacks, they recently recalled.
“We knew we might have to get involved in things like this,” said Karim Laouafi, 39, who was drafting his speech at home when the attacks happened, one of them just a few blocks away. “Yeah sure, that’s what happened.”
More than six years later, Mr Laouafi and three colleagues who took part in the 2015 competition – Merabi Murgulia, Léa Dordilly and Simon Clémenceau – took the floor again. This time, they were in a courtroom in Paris, defending two suspects in the months-long trial of 20 men accused of involvement in the 2015 attacks. The verdicts are expected Wednesday evening.
The coordinated attacks include shootings and suicide bombings in the Bataclan concert hall, where most of the victims were killed; an area outside France’s national football stadium; and the terraces of cafes and restaurants in central Paris. The attacks, which also injured nearly 500 people, were carried out by 10 Islamic State extremists, most of whom blew themselves up.
Salah Abdeslam, who appeared at the trial, one of the largest ever in France, is the only living defendant charged with participating in the attacks. The other suspects have been charged with aiding or inciting terrorists.
Nearly half of the approximately 30 attorneys involved in the process have followed a similar path to their current position. They were all in their thirties and graduated from “La Conférence,” an elite program that each year selects a handful of young lawyers from the speech competition and trains them to become top public defenders.
As attacks by Islamist radicals in France have increased over the past decade, La Conférence’s youthful faces have become increasingly well known on the benches of terrorism trials, leading to a generation of lawyers specializing in such cases.
She eventually defended a suspect in that trial.
Others are offended on social networks. “In people’s minds,” said Ms Dordilly, jihadists are “indefensible.”
But the young lawyers defending the accused at the trial of the Paris attacks (others have represented some of the plaintiffs) shrug their shoulders at the criticism leveled at them.
“We are not at any time defending terrorism,” said Mr Clémenceau. “By remaining a bit of a stronghold and making sure every defendant gets a good defense, we’re also contributing to justice,” he added.
“We are here to protect our rule of law,” said Ms Witt, who has defended clients in 12 terrorism cases and assisted complainants in the Paris trial. “We have somehow collectively become the barometer of counter-terrorism justice.”
Mr Clémenceau and Ms Dordilly, who are defending a suspect in the trial, have been involved in dozens of such cases. This year they defended the cousin of an Islamic State killer of a French priest, and they will assist the plaintiffs in the upcoming trial over a terrorist attack in Nice in 2016.
But dealing with terrorism was never part of the career plans of many of the young lawyers.
“They got there through La Conférence,” said Antoine Mégie, a political scientist at the University of Rouen, in northern France, who specializes in terrorism laws.
A two centuries old, Ivy League-esque club, La Conférence is arguably France’s most prestigious association of lawyers. Each year, it selects a dozen, all under 35, through a speech competition held in a beautiful paneled library in the old court of appeal in Paris. The winners are automatically appointed as public defenders in sensitive criminal cases in the French capital – an invaluable career boost.
For the lessons of the latter half of the 2010s, when the attacks on French soil escalated, joining La Conférence essentially meant getting yourself into a whirlwind of terrorism cases.
“I suddenly realized that this was going to become my everyday life,” said Ms Dordilly, class of 2016, as she recalled her services in the courthouse, where she often encountered armor-clad police officers escorting blindfolded suspects through the hallways.
It was there, in July 2016, that she first met Adel Haddadi, the person she is defending with Clémenceau in the trial that ends Wednesday.
Every class of La Conférence from 2013 to 2018 is represented on the process. Mr Abdeslam is being defended by a 2015 alumnus.
La Conférence, said Mr Mégie, “has indeed trained an entire generation in terrorism issues.”
Unlike some of their famous predecessors at La Conférence — such as Jacques Vergès, who defended war criminals and dictators — the lawyers at the Paris attack trial say they tried not to politicize their work. Defending jihadism is not only unthinkable, it would also yield no result in a trial, they say.
But many have been critical of the legal definition of “association of offenders in relation to a terrorist enterprise” under which most of the accused in the trial are being prosecuted.
The lawyers, along with some scholars, say the definition could lead to the prosecution of individuals based solely on allegations that the accused knew they were dealing with a group that had terrorist intentions, without even knowing details about those intentions.
“Hypothesis on hypothesis,” Adrien Sorrentino (La Conférence class of 2018) argued at trial, referring to the so-called guilt-by-association prosecutions.
In an interview, Mr. Sorrentino that participating in the trial was challenging for him and other members of his generation.
“In 2015, I am a young Parisian becoming a lawyer and on the night of the attacks, when I leave a bar, I see dozens of people bleeding in the street,” he said.
“I could very well have been one of the victims,” he added.
That harrowing dichotomy has haunted some lawyers, they said, especially when survivors testified.
“No one will leave this hearing unscathed,” Mr Murgulia told the court. “We drank to the bottom of the victims’ unprecedented grief.”
His associate, Mr. Laouafi, described the proceedings as “a generation’s trial”, noting that many of the lawyers, plaintiffs and defendants were between 30 and 45 years old.
At the outset of the trial, it was clear that some of the plaintiffs struggled to understand the missions of the lawyers defending the suspects of such horrific crimes.
But this month, after Mr Laouafi defended his client, a group of plaintiffs came to visit him and Mr Murgulia. “They told us, ‘We had trouble understanding it at first. Now we do,'” said Mr. Laouafi.
“That’s the best response,” he said.