Led by Christophe Castaner, it is now his successor at the Ministry of the Interior who must tackle the task. This Tuesday, Gérald Darmanin will defend at the end of the day in the National Assembly a controversial bill. Searches, individual control measures or even closure of places of worship: the text allowing the extension of controversial measures of the 2017 anti-terrorism law arrives before the deputies.
The administrative measures in question, adopted at the start of the five-year term despite fierce protests from defenders of public freedoms, were authorized by Parliament for three years, with the promise of a new examination in 2020 in order to vote or not on their extension.
Measures inherited from the state of emergency
These are the first four articles of Gérard Collomb's law on internal security and the fight against terrorism (Silt). This law took over from the state of emergency, an exceptional regime under which France had been living since the attacks of November 13, 2015. This concerns in particular administrative ex-searches, which since 2017 have become "home visits and seizures" , and house arrest, transformed into “individual administrative control and surveillance measures” (Micas), with a perimeter at least equal to the municipality of residence.
The protection perimeters, in the event of an event exposed to a risk of acts of terrorism, as well as the closure of places of worship were also subject to a review clause before December 31, 2020. Also on the program, the extension of the experimentation of the technique known as "algorithm" in terms of intelligence, contained in the so-called "intelligence" law of July 2015. This technique makes it possible to analyze communications exchanged within an operator's network, to detect the threats.
High threat
A Senate report in February deemed these measures effective and encouraged their extension, but the Covid-19 crisis has shaken up the legislative calendar. "The exceptional health circumstances (...) make it difficult to examine in good time, and under appropriate conditions for debate, by Parliament, of a specific bill on the conditions for the sustainability or abolition of these measures. “, Is it underlined in the preamble of the bill of extension.
The text provided for an end to December 31, 2021, a deadline that the deputies reduced to July 31, 2021, at the initiative of the rapporteur Didier Paris (LREM). He stressed that this would allow Parliament to take up a full review earlier: "if individual freedoms do not require urgent changes to these provisions, we must debate them quickly".
An extension decided "on the sly"?
The government has planned that a new bill will come "to perpetuate these provisions but also supplement or modify these two laws (Silt and intelligence), in order to take into account the necessary changes induced by operational needs".
The government had previously wanted to introduce, on the sly according to its opponents, the extension of these measures until January 2022 in the bill on "various urgent provisions to deal with the consequences of the Covid-19 epidemic" in mid-May . But several figures of the majority have stepped up to oppose it.
According to the latest data from the Ministry of the Interior, as of June 19, 294 Micas had been taken, of which 63 are still in force and 167 "visits" have been carried out since November 1, 2017. The threat remains at a high level, acknowledge all parliamentarians. Some 60% of French people who left to jihad between 1986 and 2011 in Afghanistan, Bosnia or Iraq, have reoffended on their return, according to a study by the Terrorism Analysis Center (CAT) published on Tuesday.
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- National Assembly
- Law
- Christophe Castaner
- Counterterrorism
- Gérald Darmanin
- Terrorist
- Terrorism
- Justice