PARIS, Dec 10: A French appeals court ruled late on Monday that more than 40 Romanian displaced persons rounded up last week at a gypsy encampment near Paris had been legally released on Thursday from police detention who were preparing to expel them back to Bucharest.

Of the 55 Romanian paperless immigrants concerned by the decision, the Cour d’Appel de Paris ruled that only six of them could be returned to police detention as they await their deportation from French soil. Which means, says one of the lawyers defending the DPs, that the 49 remaining DPs can remain on French soil, although they nevertheless remain paperless.

As for French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, the principal architect of the recent series of expulsions, he characterized the decision as “perfectly absurd,” and posed the question as to “why our country should be the only one (in the world) not to be able to decide whether (DPs) should be allowed to remain or not.”