A woman's battle to prove she isn't dead
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It’s just a mix of malice, apathy, incompetence. Ministers and highly placed officials or even heads of the state have stepped in for lesser inconveniences.
A person is in front of you - literally living and breathing - what the f else do you need to establish that person is alive!
They need more to establish the fact that this is actually the person they claim to be.
This is way different for the bank teller that's known her for 30 years. They know who's standing in front of them (presumably).
Way different for someone that's never met this person. The bar is higher. These guys would would want more than just the one bank teller to affidavit that this actually is the person that all records show is actually deceased.
Depending on country and their bureaucracy (she does seem to be in France, so ...) this could be quite hard.
It should be fairly simple to get an equivalent. A sworn statement by her husband, perhaps. Her mother, if still alive. Or heck, by now there might be biological records that can be matched up (e.g. dental).
This should be a fairly easy procedural fix.
The problem is that we're really poorly equipped to handle problems of identity. It's hard to prove that you are you, absent documentation. Documentation usually issued by a government, or by a private agency on behalf of a government. And if that government thinks you're dead, well, all that documentation is worth about as much as the paper it's printed on.
Short of, say, a dental, medical or DNA match, then yeah, this is a really hard procedural fix.
The fact that they're dead hardly seems relevant. Right now today you can give my birth state $20 and pinky promise that you're me, and they'll mail my birth certificate to any shady shell company you choose. You can bootstrap that document into the rest of my identity. If that's the standard of evidence for impersonating living people I don't know why we'd go through so many hoops to make impersonating dead people hard.
But in this case, it seems there is no procedure at all. She is never asked for evidence A, B, and C. She's essentially asking "this is an error, what can I do to fix it?" and the answer is essentially "nothing."
As the in-between poster mentioned, he routinely does it with his kids. I presume he's in a country where this is easier then. That's why I mentioned France vs. being somewhere else.
Here in Canada I could believe for example that this might be easier (though I have nothing but conjecture). I say that because I do know that getting your papers for the very first time "all" you need is for two persons that are already Canadian citizens to affidavit that they've known you for at least 2 years (IIRC) and that they think you are who you claim you are. On top of like your birth certificate. But thats not necessarily Canadian and not sure how much that can or will be checked.
I know from some colleague who is Vietnamese, born somewhere in China while fleeing, who had no birth certificate and doesn't know his actual birth day (just roughly the year), never mind where he was born exactly. When he wanted to do something that required a birth certificate a Chinese co-worker offered to "talk to a guy" and "get him a birth certificate".
I presume France lies on the other end of the spectrum :)
Sure it's easy, I'll give you that. The identity thieves would have a heyday cleaning out estates and running up credit until someone made it difficult again to assume someone else's identity.
Further, Article 6 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: "Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law."
She needs a better lawyer....
A much less severe version of this is changing your first name (or, indeed, gender marker). Systems are only now gaining the ability to even change some of these records, but often it is up to the people with limited access to these systems to "work around" them. Whenever possible I didn't even ask to change my name, just close one account and make another. Including with a bank that actually suggested I do this.
This happens occasionally in the U.S. Two recent cases:
- Alecia Faith Pennington: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/invis...
- Jamie Lanosga: https://gazette.com/news/born-in-the-usa-without-a-shred-of-...
It is a major hassle to establish your legal identity as an adult. It seems to take a politician intervening.
As the individual is officially deceased, you need some documentation from before they were recognised as such, granting their rights to a recognisable individual.
That is, the lawyer needs to be granted the right to represent her, but she probably doesn't currently have the necessary legal paperwork to give them that. She can't represent her own estate - she's legally dead.
Haha, very Kafka!
Seriously, though, I find it hard to imagine that this is an impossible case.
This is still the west and courts still work. Don't be intimidated.
First potential hitch. How do you file legal paperwork in the name of someone who is dead? Do you have ID to prove who you are? While you can probably file a court case without photo ID, you can't file anonymously in most jurisdictions. And you can't use a fraudulent identity like the name of some dead person...
Trust me. Things will start moving very quickly.
Exceed the speed limit. Reject the fine claiming you are dead.
Trust me. The possibilities are endless and take my word, I would enjoy them.
What's worse you have no rights because dead people have very limited rights.
In Mdm Pouchain's shoes, I would likely attempt to commit some minor crime. When brought before the court, I would argue: you cannot punish a dead person. So you must either legally declare me alive so we can continue, or let me go.
And if they choose the latter option, the logical next step is escalation of the crimes.
Damn, this would be a really fun novel
The more questionable/compelling scenario would be if she had some sort of contract in her name - loan, credit card, lease, whatever - and whether it could be enforced. At that point, the plaintiff would have to prove that a) the contract was valid and b) it was with her.
Of course, since she doesn't have any form of ID, whatever notarization-equivalent wouldn't be possible.
Or maybe, that's the loophole? Sign a contract with her for some small sum. She breaches the contract. Now sue her to prove her status and identity?
My God, what a mess.
I did imagine something along those lines while reading, though. She'd made a badass invincible assassin for hire
According to the article, it’s pretty clear that no death certificate was ever filed, which appears to be a requirement in France. So there’s even a formal error that should void the procedure that followed. This readily demonstrates the unwillingness and compartmentalization at play here.
I’m in a similar but different situation due to fictional health insurance costs. In Germany, public health insurance cost is calculated based on your income, with a hard cap at the top. I’ve had very little to no income for a couple of years. Due to a procedural error, I was charged the maximum amount. I’m fighting this for 9 years now and have to deal with constant harassment and ballooning debt north of 35k EUR, most of which is entirely invented but is collected on with the full force of law enforcement. Any attempt to find an agreeable solution failed. It’s obvious to anyone looking at the facts that money is wanted that never existed in the first place. A dozen employees of the insurance even admitted to that fact. Still, they won’t change the order because they feel they can’t. No one wants to be in the position to explain an auditor why 30k+ of outstanding payments were dropped. It’s as simple as that.
My life has been hell at times due to that. The drones don’t care. They just want to do what is expected of them. It doesn’t matter if it destroys lives.
It appears that the only way out now is to declare bankruptcy. Which appears to be fine with them. They end up getting nothing at all, not even the clearly owed amounts, but that’s fine because it’s “procedurally correct” and no one may end up in the hot seat. Except me of course.
https://www.improbable.com/2020/12/09/update-on-film-about-f...
Update: That is actually mentioned in the article. I had only skimmed it, and missed that somehow. Oops.
And the cherry on top. I di not know that free person in France can not legally move without Ausweis. Nice.
In fact, there's a type of trolling that's become endemic in the US which allows that you are responsible for your situation, and if your situation is good you must deserve it (prosperity gospel), and if it's bad, you must deserve it too (prosperity gospel's evil twin).
But the noise will attract the trolls as well as supporters, and she's got to be prepared for it. And it sounds like she's not psychologically well (as one would expect) so its a serious downside to making noise.
That is not how this works. Bureaucrats needs to legally be instructed to change the register, "I saw something yesterday on TV and I am going to change official records" would be the worse bureaucracy ever. A bureaucrat that did such a change would end out of a job and maybe in prison for a good reason.
> How fucked up the system must be to allow such abuse.
The "system" works for millions of people. One weird case and you want to throw away the complete system. Google or Facebook close accounts randomly, meanwhile the state is able to keep proper records for a century with minimum mistakes. Yes, it is bad for this woman. Yes, they need to fix her case. No, it is not a reason to throw away a system that works.
> France
From the article, this also happened in Ohio. "In 2013, an Ohio judge ruled that Donald E Miller Jr would have to stay legally deceased, even though Miller was sitting in the courtroom to hear his fate, perfectly healthy. He had been declared dead in 1994 after having disappeared in 1986, owing thousands of dollars in unpaid child support. His ex-wife had requested Miller be declared dead so she would eligible for social security benefits. When Miller returned – he had been working out of state – he was told that Ohio cannot reverse death certificates after more than three years."
> I did not know that free person in France can not legally move without Ausweis.
Not in France nor in the USA. Try to move around the USA without a birth certificate and you are going to find how many problems you have to access properties and a job. Even in the Roman Empire you needed a birth certificate to prove ownership of land.
Who said anything about "throwing away a system". Just fix the fucking particular case. I am pretty sure if shit like this happened to their president it would've been handled in a minute. Taking away her rights was illegal in a first place anyways.
>"Not in France nor in the USA. Try to move around the USA without a birth certificate"
Under "move" I meant just simply walking on a street without ID. Not things like buying a house. If one can be charged for simply walking on a street without ID the country is fucked.
The next person doesn't have a clue what to do either, so the buck never stops being passed. The pencil-pushers don't know how to push this pencil. The bean-counters don't know how to count this bean. The bureau has a problem it can't crat.
I've done my share of fixing similar situations in the past while doing some jobs for Telecoms.
And it this was normal country ( I am not singling it out as we are fucking up people as well ) they should be able to quickly escalate it to the level that can simply order the fucking box unchecked. Unfortunately the victim is not some VIP otherwise they would've solved it in no time.
IRS flagged me as deceased. Institutions acted on it. Closed accounts. Condolence letters. Clerical error at local office it was deemed. No culprit. No repair action.
Took 2 years of bonkers discussions with copious notes and pain on a biweekly follow-up basis to resolve.
You are the only one who can fix your problems with a spaghetti mess like this. You must lead it to the finish line.
So does the administrative incompetance of both the government and legal systems.
The threat about driving is hilarious. So she drives, gets caught driving or speeding. Who are they then going to charge? Whatever answer you come up with, the response will be: But she's dead. Now what? They'll have to charge her. Won't that be hilarious: charging a dead person. For driving. Take that to court.
The seizure of assets thing. Linking the car as her asset has to be incompetant policing. The deceased estate has to close off sometime. So add that to the list as well.
In reality they know she's alive and they just don't want to fix it because they simply don't want to. The case where her identity was deemed dead just has to be overturned - the fact they won't implies they don't want to. Just because. More corruption.
What a mess.
Say this happens in America.
The defendant files for habeas corpus.
"Here I am, Your Honor, filing for my own body to be produced for trial. Shall I leave and walk back in or will it suffice for your bailiff to say that I am in fact standing in front of you making this motion? Thank you."
From the article: In 2013, an Ohio judge ruled that Donald E Miller Jr would have to stay legally deceased, even though Miller was sitting in the courtroom to hear his fate, perfectly healthy. He had been declared dead in 1994.
A Jane Doe, who is also refusing to identify herself, by falsely giving the name of a dead person.
Just a guess, but imagine she would get jailed until someone can prove her identity. Which would be a long time.
Or she gets charged as a Jane Doe of sorts, with extra contempt stuff (do they have that in France?) heaped on for refusing to identify herself.
So just because they don't admit someone specific exists, doesn't mean they have to ignore that someone exists.
I did once manage to get ID based purely on arrest/jail paperwork (who just wrote what I told them) and an envelope that was addressed to me, so resurrection could be possible.
In France, though? With their national ID system I wouldn't expect that to work
Which made me think of that already, how are they going to fine a "dead" person?
In our decentralized future[1] this kind of error will be impossible to rectify, as long as someone believes you are dead or just untrustable.
1. Companies like https://www.identiq.com/ (they are far from only ones)
Summary to convince you the link is clickworthy:
Basically death certificates are the "identity system" version of free(). They're how identities (which are valuable) become no longer valid. He shows how to hack this, which is much easier than the malloc() side since adult death certificates are valid immediately whereas adult birth certificates need to be aged (at least) 18 years.
It is stupidly easy to get certified as one of the roles (coroner, funeral director, etc) that are allowed to file death reports, which nowadays are just text boxes and clicking on a webpage. This results in a death certificate listing whatever the attacker desires. In particular, they get to declare the next of kin. These declarations fail to be validated shockingly often.
End results are (a) life insurance fraud (b) probate fraud and (c) pretty vicious revenge served cold, since getting declared dead causes a ton of huge problems for the target but not for a while (e.g. when passports come up for renewal).
His delivery is also awesome, a bunch of really funny deadpan jokes.
Best quote: slide title "reasons for killing someone". Last bullet point "Kill your opposing lawyer, the judge, or IRS auditor to slow them down."
I live in Canada and we have our own stories of people becoming non persons (stateless). It is horrible that those take years and decades to resolve. It is beyond my understanding how we can claim being civilized countries and still allow crime like this to take place and have no special laws to fix such gross fuck-ups promptly.
They've been slowly working towards that goal. Protocol 16, which allows national courts to request advisory opinions from the ECHR, is a step towards that. But it is a difficult journey because some member states don't want to see the ECHR become more effective.
Basically the idea is that in cases like this the government must be made hurting and there are plenty of ways to make them really hurting without doing anything extreme. Just suspend the salary of the whole office and see how their attention span suddenly change. And whoever voted in laws allowing such a gross fuck ups - fine them for negligence when introducing laws without safety measures built in, or give them all inclusive accommodation in Club Fed.
I hear a lot of blubbering here advocating people to be jailed for not following proper security with infrastructure software. Well I think the cases like the one mentioned should be a higher priority.
It's great if the Canadian legal system lets you do this. But this woman is in France, would the French courts be willing to grant such a remedy? No idea; all I can say is that French law and Canadian law are very different.
(Parts of Quebec law are derived from French law historically, but Quebec law has been heavily influenced by English law as well, and French and Quebec law have had 260 years to evolve in separate directions.)
These are not loan words that exist in English, and the untranslated words themselves did not seem essential to the story.
I've seen a similar issue with Anime fansubs where the translator deems certain words to be untranslatable, and then adds an entire extra sentence of definition on screen upon the first usage.
Because they are effectively proper nouns. You cannot translate them, you can at most explain them. For example, grande école has its own page on English Wikipedia and which is called grande école, not translated to big school or something else.
>I've seen a similar issue with Anime fansubs where the translator deems certain words to be untranslatable,
Yes, as it should be. This is why official translations suck and fansubs are superior works.
They are. "grande école" can be translated to "big school", but in French it means a prestigious school. "carte d'identité" is also a specific document, since you can also prove your identity with your passport or your driver's license. For the "mairie" part, I don't know about the specifics of town halls in the USA so I can't compare. It's probably that they work differently so using the same word would imply the same thing.
> This is why official translations suck and fansubs are superior works.
Don't get me started on half-assed attempts at localization, especially when made by people that can't even understand the original language.
The more common problem is the opposite. People who think they speak Japanese because they know what "-chan" means demand "unlocalized" works, by which they mean works translated into "English but we left in a few Japanese words the readers know".
This provides essentially no benefit because the act of translating into English already removed way more meaning than a few honorifics can keep. Sometimes it even means translating Japanese words into other ones, since the readers don't even know every honorific, they just think they do.
Amateur translations also like to leave in English words in the original text, not knowing they have totally different meanings in Japan.
Isn't "unlocalized" the base state? Just translate it, and don't replace the references with others? At least that's how I understand it.
> This provides essentially no benefit because the act of translating into English already removed way more meaning than a few honorifics can keep. Sometimes it even means translating Japanese words into other ones, since the readers don't even know every honorific, they just think they do.
Are we talking about the same things? What I refer to as localizations is when people substitute references for other references more familiar to the target audiance. It's not about losing something or not losing it, since by translating you always lose something, but creating an entirely new experience. The split is then on people that prefer a worse but more genuine experience (by that I mean closer to the original) vs the people that want a better but less genuine experience.
> Amateur translations also like to leave in English words in the original text, not knowing they have totally different meanings in Japan.
Localized vs unlocalized is a different debate from amateur vs professional translation I think.
That's not what they're complaining about, because that 4Kids style of release doesn't happen anymore. Except for Ace Attorney/Nintendo games/FFXIV, which are still quite different in English (and often better).
They've just started calling it "localization" whenever the few things they recognize look slightly different ignoring all the things they can't recognize because they don't speak Japanese.
Another reason professional translations might have changes is just for legal reasons, like copyright avoidance, or just because Japanese authors tend to be into possibly illegal sex stuff.
> Localized vs unlocalized is a different debate from amateur vs professional translation I think.
The original post said "fansubs". Which is weird because nobody does those anymore.
It provides the benefit of teaching the reader about the culture they're reading about. This casual experience you gain by seeing them can help you understand bits and pieces of the language and can make it easier to learn it.
But also, an example of "localization" is that in FFXIV in Japanese the people in the pirate city don't talk like pirates and in English they do. You can't learn anything about Japan from this. (This is part because Japanese doesn't have any pirate stereotypes and part because S-E's Japanese writers aren't actually that good.)
It would really surprise me if it were the case. Being a good translator requires years of studying and it’s not just a matter of knowing a foreign language. An anime nerd may occasionally find a slightly better way of translating a Japanese word into English (and quite often it would be better only for other anime nerds and not for the general public), but it be would really surprising if randos were better translators than real translators.
As an aside, as someone who complimented his studies of Japanese by watching dramas and anime before eventually living in Japan for years and becoming fluent. I can say that the amateur fan translations were very often much better.
Not sure why for the others you mention, except that they're very specific concepts in France as well, which don't really have very good analogues in the US.
Or maybe they just like the sound of the French word and want to sound more sophisticated.
And anyway town hall is not an precise translation for mairie. In my home town in the south of England a more correct equivalent would be civic offices. Also in the UK reporting a death is done online these days, definitely not at the town hall.
Actually I don't know for sure how these things are done in France but that they are done differently seems certain.
http://www.servicealberta.gov.ab.ca/find-a-registry-agent.cf...
Some people will tell you that "aloha" means "hello" and "goodbye". That's not really true. It used as a salutation and a farewell, but "aloha" means Aloha: a whole concept that is specific to Hawaiian culture that often translates more accurately as "beloved".
"Your honor. She has alibi. She was dead when it happened."
...
"she has finally been able to get her first Covid vaccination, although she had to pay €150 for it"
Do the homeless have to pay for covid vaccination in France?
I believe that people can get mistakenly declared dead and depending on how corrupted the legal system is, it may be almost impossible to reverse the decision. I wouldn't expect this in France however. Maybe, a year or two to resolve if the bureaucracy is moving slowly. There is something that is missing in this article. I can buy that the court had a gullible judge or something but what about other institutions that award social security or medical care? Wouldn't they need a death certificate? And if they had made a mistake wouldn't they try to correct it?
In Latvia there is central register of all persons. Some people immigrate to other countries and then die there and the register never gets updated, therefore according to this register we have a lot of people over 100 years old. You could go to the court to make a case that a certain person has disappeared for really long time, so he must be dead by now. I have never heard about such cases being reversed but theoretically someone still could return from abroad alive. I don't think that the state would refuse to correct their mistake unless it was a question of national security or a lot of money was involved.
The journalist needed to go the extra step here and didn't.
> Later, Pouchain’s lawyer, Sylvain Cormier, tells me the solicitor’s letter informing Pouchain the industrial tribunal case was being dropped was probably a phoney pause, while Mme H’s lawyer drew breath to relaunch the case. Sometime afterwards, the case returned to court – where it was said that Pouchain had died and that her “heirs” would be asked to settle. “This should not have happened,” Cormier says.
> [...]
> “When Mme Pouchain first told me her story, I found it hard to believe,” says Cormier. “I said, ‘It’s just not possible.’ But I read the files and it is – everything she told me was unbelievable but perfectly true. It appears there was no certificate of death, it was just taken on someone’s word. Nobody checked.”
"The letter informed her that a lawyer in a court case relating to her cleaning business had told the court that she had died, aged 53, in February 2016. Somehow, this unverified claim – there was no official death certificate, how could there be? – was allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged."
Then further down: "“It was a trap, an ambush. She couldn’t win the proceedings while I was alive, so she had me declared dead,”"
It appears that the woman (or attorney) suing her for some employment error claimed she was dead to be able to get an advantage in their lawsuit, and to be able to go after her "heirs".
Live humans are seen by the legal system as entities which make the "legal fiction" profitable to interact with.