The grandparents of two young children stranded with their mother in a refugee camp in Kurdish-held northern Syria are on Monday to challenge at Europe's top rights court France's refusal to allow them home, their lawyers said.
The grandparents of the children, whose mother had joined Islamic State (IS) in Syria, will file a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) asking for it to condemn France for violating the rights of the children under the European Convention on Human Rights.
"By refusing to repatriate this mother and these two sick children who are wounded and in a state of extreme weakness, France is consciously and deliberately exposing them to inhumane and degrading treatment," the four lawyers said in a statement to AFP.
The defence is arguing that France's refusal to bring the children back constitutes a violation of their right to enter the state where they are a citizen.
The boy, aged three and the girl, four, were wounded with their mother in the battle for Baghouz, the last stronghold of IS before it was taken by Kurdish-led forces.
They have been held for the last three months in the camp of Al-Hol in the northeast of the country where 73,00 people are living according to the United Nations, including 12,000 foreigners.
The lawyers for the family said cholera, tuberculosis and dysentery were spreading in the camp.
The mother is targeted by an arrest warrant from a French anti-terror judge. But the family's lawyers said she "wants to see her children repatriated and assume her penal responsibility on French territory".
The case has some similarities to that of British girl Shamima Begum who ran away to join the Islamic State group in Syria.
Begum had asked to return home after giving birth to a son earlier this year in a refugee camp in northeastern Syria, but London refused. The three-week-old baby died from pneumonia.
French families in similar situations have sought to bring relatives home through the France's legal system but without success.
Paris refuses to bring back French jihadists who joined IS in Syria and Iraq and will only take back their children on a case-by-case basis.
Five orphaned children returned on March 15 and a three-year-old girl -- whose mother had been sentenced to life jail in Iraq -- on March 27.