The saga of a half-completed motorway sees a new twist with an appeal from the government against an order to halt its construction.
The French government is appealing a court decision that ruled the half-built A69 autoroute between Toulouse and Castres was illegal for environmental reasons.
The ruling was made at the end of February and also ordered all work on the half-completed motorway to halt.
Work on the road is estimated to have cost some €300m to date.
Read more: Court rules that A69 motorway is ‘illegal’ and stops work
Although an appeal against the decisions of the court is thought likely to take at least two years, the government has in the meantime asked the administrative court of appeal for a stay of execution, as provided for in article 811-15 du Code de justice administrative.
This would potentially allow for work to resume pending the appeal decision.
However, legal experts said it would not make sense for the Toulouse court to lift the work ban because, if they did so, the motorway would be completed before the appeal was heard.
“The simple fact of an appeal against the decision will not remove the ban on more work on the A69,” said Arnaud Gossement, an environmental lawyer, who was consulted by the Public Senat TV programme.
The appeal against the ruling is likely to be heard at the Conseil d’Etat in Paris, France’s highest court for administrative justice, but the one against the suspension will remain in the Toulouse court where it was originally imposed.
A complication could come from legal conventions which mean that courts choose which cases to hear.
“The Toulouse court could decide to hear the appeal against the suspension straight away, in a couple of weeks, a couple of years or never,” said Mr Gossement.
There was no reaction from the Toulouse court after news broke that the government lodged the appeals.
Legal confusion over motorway’s ‘necessity’
In the aftermath of the February ruling the government insisted that work building the 53km-long autoroute should be allowed to continue – but struggled to find a legal mechanism to do so.
Judges in the Toulouse administrative court ordered in the February ruling that builders down tools because the government has failed to show that there is a raison imperative d’intérêt public majeur (RIIPM, or key issue of public interest) for the road.
The concept of the RIIPM was introduced by a 2016 law entitled Protection du patrimoine naturel, which passed without much opposition through parliament, and was incorporated in government decrees.
The 2016 law was one part of a package of legislation passed when France gave protecting farmland, natural habitats, flora and fauna a higher legal status than had existed before.
It means that projects which harm the environment have to not only have to have a déclaration d’utilité publique, which allows the state to buy land even when people do not want to sell it, but also meet the RIIPM criteria.
The judges said that the government’s main argument, that the autoroute was needed to protect Castres from a decline due to its “isolation” were contradicted by figures from the state statistics agency INSEE, which showed that Castres has done as least as well as similar towns close to Toulouse over the past 20 years.
“The court found, from INSEE studies, that the Castres-Mazamet basin has not seen a population fall when compared to other employment basins around Toulouse, and the area has all the usual services, a hospital, university training, an airport with flights to Paris, and a railway station with regular trains to Toulouse,” the court explained in its ruling.
In another part of the ruling the court said that the existing road between Castres and Toulouse did not have a particularly bad accident record, but that the no-toll road alongside the A69, would lose some of the safety features which currently exist.
Tolls on the new autoroute had been set at €6.77 for cars, making it one of the most expensive roads per km in France.
Read more: 2025 French motorway toll increases
Issue remains contentious
Opponents to the A69 said after the ruling that they had warned the government in 2023 when work first started that it was breaking the law.
They hope that the courts will eventually rule that the state returns the parts of the road already built to a natural state.
The autoroute was first proposed in the 1970s, but early plans were never implemented because of the cost and what was seen then as limited benefit.
Protestors climbed trees and held other demonstrations in a bid to stop work, but were unsuccessful, until the court ruling in late February.
A number of protestors are out on bail while investigating magistrates decide whether to proceed with trials after frequent arrests during anti A69 protests.
One protester, a transgender woman, was kept in a male prison for four months while a case of destroying machinery was investigated against her, before being bailed.
After the court ruling, a demonstration supported by local councils and the Castres chamber of commerce and industry, assembled several hundred people, who called for work to continue.
