A French court on Wednesday rejected a legal complaint seeking to scrap the operation of the representative office of the self-proclaimed People's Republic of Donetsk (DPR) in France's southern city of Marseille, the entity's head Hubert Fayard told Sputnik.
PARIS (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 06th September, 2018) A French court on Wednesday rejected a legal complaint seeking to scrap the operation of the representative office of the self-proclaimed People's Republic of Donetsk (DPR) in France's southern city of Marseille, the entity's head Hubert Fayard told Sputnik.
The representative office was inaugurated in September 2017, after which the French Foreign Ministry claimed that the center had been officially registered as an association thus lacking any diplomatic status in the country.
"The court of Aix-en-Provence has just rejected the lawsuit of [President Emmanuel] Macron's government ... The association will continue representing the DPR within the framework of the French law and protect the rights of the DPR people in line with the international standards," Fayard said.
The French court's ruling to dismiss the case showed that the country's justice system recognized the "justification for the DPR French representative office existence, hence the existence of the DPR," Fayard argued.
The case was initially set to be considered by the court in January, but the hearing was repeatedly adjourned since then.
The French center has become the fifth representative office of the DPR to open on EU territory after offices in the Czech Republic, Finland, Greece and Italy were inaugurated.
In 2014, the Ukrainian army started an offensive against the residents of the eastern Donbas region who refused to recognize the newly-formed government. The conflict between the DPR and the Luhansk People's Republic (LPR) on one side, and Kiev' forces on the other has claimed over 10,000 lives, according to UN figures, and is still ongoing.
