MIVILUDES: CAP LC’s follow up report to the OSCE published at the Warsaw Human Dimension Conference

The Warsaw Human Dimension Conference

From 5 to 15 October 2026, delegations of the participating States, civil society representatives and independent experts gather in Warsaw for the annual Human Dimension Conference organized by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, the principal human rights event of the OSCE calendar. CAP LC contributed to the conference with a report on France and the MIVILUDES, published on the OSCE website under reference CIO.WHDC.CS/0086/26/EN. The report documents the judicial sanctions pronounced against the French interministerial mission and its partner associations, and examines the structural role of the media in the stigmatization of religious minorities.

A follow up to the OSCE country visit

In June 2025, the Personal Representatives of the OSCE Chair in Office carried out a country visit to France. Their report, finalized in March 2026, found that the methodology of the MIVILUDES lacks clarity and a definition of sectarian deviations, that the same activity is labeled as an aberration when it concerns minority communities, and it recommended that the Mission engage in dialogue with faith communities and give them access to redacted accounts of the anonymous reports on which public designations rest. The CAP LC report measures the distance between these recommendations and the practice. In less than two years, the Paris Administrative Court has sanctioned the MIVILUDES seven times, six of them in 2025, for false information, misleading presentations of the right of access to documents and refusals of communication. The Cour des comptes has denounced a global absence of rigor in the allocation of public subsidies, the national financial prosecutor investigates several components of the system, and a law of May 2024 reinforced the institution rather than reforming it, creating an offence of psychological subjection close to the concepts of mental manipulation that scholars have long criticized.

Media amplification: an echo in other contributions

The media dimension documented in the CAP LC report, where designations produced without contradiction are reproduced by the press without independent verification and lock the stigma in place, finds a direct echo in another contribution to the same conference. In its submission for Plenary Session 3, the Path of YahRa International Spiritual Society (POYRA) describes a comparable sequence in Czechia: a television investigation amplified into more than one hundred media items, the professional exclusion of two teachers identified as members of the community, and remedies fragmented between institutions that never examined the cumulative effect on the affected persons. POYRA respectfully asks ODIHR, among other requests, to encourage, in cooperation with the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, discussion on responsible reporting about minority religious communities, including meaningful opportunities for affected persons to respond to serious allegations. The convergence of two independent documentations, on France and on Czechia, suggests that media driven stigmatization is a transnational pattern, and not a series of isolated national accidents.

Read the full CAP LC report