57 Winter 2025 he French judiciary sanctioned discriminatory decisions by the French government that excluded Israeli participants from defense exhibitions twice in the space of four months. The first incident occurred during the EUROSATORY1 exhibition in June 2024, which took place in Paris and brought together people involved in the fields of defense and security from around the world. The second case occurred in October 2024 with reference to the EURONAVAL Exhibition, which was attended by military and industrial stakeholders from the global naval sector. The decisions rendered by the courts highlight the importance of judicial strategies, particularly the initiative to pursue legal action. In both cases, proceedings were brought by means of summary proceedings (référé), which are emergency legal procedures. The possibility of granting litigants almost immediate access to a judge – either “to prevent imminent harm or to halt a manifestly unlawful disturbance” – is relatively new to French law: In all urgent cases, the president of the judicial court or the judge in charge of protection disputes, within the limits of his jurisdiction, may order in summary proceedings all measures that do not meet with any serious challenge or that are justified by the existence of a dispute. The president of the judicial court or the judge in charge of protection disputes within the limits of his jurisdiction may always, even in the presence of a serious dispute, prescribe in summary proceedings the necessary precautionary or restoration measures, either to prevent imminent damage or to put an end to a manifestly unlawful disturbance.”2 This mechanism was introduced as part of the 1972 civil procedure reform attributed to Henri Motulsky,3 a genius in private law. By allowing a plaintiff to summon the adversary to appear before the presiding judge for a summary proceeding within an hour of receiving notice, the plaintiff claiming that such urgency is necessary can hope to have the case adjudicated even within an hour or, at most, a few days. In the case of EUROSATORY, the France Palestine Solidarité association and the intervening parties took the initiative.4 They brought the initial request for a summary proceeding against COGES (Commissariat Général des Expositions et Salons), the organizing company of the EUROSATORY exhibition, based on the decision of the International Court of Justice of January 26, 2024,5 which prescribed the measures that the State of Israel must take to prevent what could be classified as genocide. The judicial court of Bobigny issued a ruling on June 14, 2024, on the grounds that “the obligation to prevent a crime, which could, if necessary, be classified by a competent judicial authority as genocide, rests with the States parties.”6 By its ruling, the Court deemed the measures undertaken by exhibition organizers – at the From the River to the Sea: How the French Judge Enforced Israel’s Presence at the EURONAVAL Exhibition Marc Lévy 1. EUROSATORY is an international exhibition for land and air-land defense and security industry. It is held every two years in the Paris-Nord Villepinte Exhibition Centre, Paris, France. 2. Code de procédure civile [C.P.C.] [Civil Procedure Code] arts. 834, 835, 873 (Fr.), depending on whether it concerns a civil or a commercial court. 3. Henri Motulsky was a German Jew who fled to France in 1933, enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, and later joined the Resistance, where he prepared his doctoral thesis – a prolegomenon to the reform of civil procedure. 4. Action Sécurité Ethique Républicaines; Stop Fuelling Wars; Al-Haq Law in the Service of Man. 5. Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), Order, 2024 I.C.J. 192 (Jan. 26), available at https://www.icj-cij.org/node/203447 T
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