Paris (AFP)

The Senate dominated by the right-wing opposition gave its final green light Wednesday to the controversial bill on "global security", and its article 24 rewritten by it, before the final vote of the National Assembly scheduled for the 15th April.

The bill was adopted by 241 votes in favor (LR, centrists, RDPI with a radical majority, Independents) and 98 against (PS, CRCE with a communist majority and ecologists).

The radical majority RDSE group was divided between abstentions, votes against and votes in favor.

Deputies and senators reached an agreement on March 29 on this LREM text renamed "Global security law preserving freedoms".

Senate President Gérard Larcher (LR) hailed "a victory for the Senate, of which nearly 80% of the amendments were retained".

This is particularly the case with the new wording of article 24, which must protect the police in operation, but has crystallized criticism.

In line with what the Senate had voted for, the parliamentarians meeting in a joint committee (CMP) recorded the creation in the penal code of an offense of "provocation to identification".

There is no longer any reference to the 1881 law on freedom of the press.

"Faced with death threats which are too often victims of our police, we are strengthening their protection by creating a new offense of provocation to identify an agent in intervention", welcomed the leader. of LREM deputies Christophe Castaner.

Easier use of police pedestrian cameras, drones during demonstrations, and also the creation of a municipal police force in Paris and expansion of the powers of municipal police officers: the LREM deputies' bill had been largely set to music by the ministry of the Interior, in tune with the police unions.

For the Minister in charge of Citizenship, Marlène Schiappa, "it is a text of confidence towards the elected officials on the ground", with an ambition "of territorial multiplication of security".

It is also "a text of firmness", she underlined.

Among the other contributions of the Senate figure the limitation "to the most serious offenses" of "the abolition of the credits of reduction of sentence for the authors of offenses committed against an elected official, a police officer or a gendarme ".

The upper house made "legally robust additions (...) and in a real demand for the preservation of public freedoms", affirmed the centrist co-rapporteur Loïc Hervé.

The text sparked a strong mobilization on the part of organizations for the defense of freedoms and journalists' unions, as well as the left, all deeming this text "liberticidal".

Laurence Harribey has already announced that the PS group would seize the Constitutional Council on this "drifting" text.

© 2021 AFP