Paris (AFP)
The Constitutional Council, seized by parliamentarians from the left and from the right, delivered on Friday an expected decision on the controversial bill against separatism, adopted in July after seven months of bitter debate between the majority and the oppositions.
Carried by the Minister of the Interior Gerald Darmanin, the text, officially called "Respect for the principles of the Republic", was presented as a remedy against "the Islamist OPA".
Three days after its final adoption on July 23 in the National Assembly, more than 60 deputies from the left and as many from the right as well as the LR senators seized the Sages of the Palais-Royal to censor several of its provisions which they deem to kill.
The bill set to music Emmanuel Macron's speech on October 2 at Les Mureaux, where he presented his long-awaited strategy to fight radical Islam.
It contains a battery of sometimes technical measures on the neutrality of the public service, the fight against online hatred, the protection of civil servants and teachers, the supervision of family education, the reinforced control of associations, the transparency of cults and their funding, or the fight against virginity certificates, polygamy and forced marriages.
- Risk of "arbitrariness" -
If the majority has managed to preserve its unity on this highly flammable subject on the whole, the right and the left have fought the text for different reasons.
The Socialist Party, which voted against with La France insoumise and the communists, described it in particular as a "missed date with the Republic".
A law with "anti-Muslim vocation", criticized the leader of the rebels Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
On the Republicans side, the deputies castigated a "lukewarm" and "soft" text, while the senators, in the majority at the Luxembourg Palace, tried in vain to harden it with measures against the wearing of the veil or strengthening the "neutrality" in university.
Nevertheless, the opposition parties agreed on the risks that the bill poses in their eyes to the freedom of association, erected fifty years ago by the Wise Men as a principle with constitutional value.
A demonstrator, during a rally against the bill against separatism, in Paris on March 21, 2021 Alain JOCARD AFP
Article 6, which provides that any association requesting a subsidy must first commit to subscribe to "a republican contract of engagement" concentrates a lot of criticism.
The elements of this contract - respect for the principles of freedom, equality, fraternity and dignity of the human person, not to call into question the secular character of the Republic, not to disturb public order - "are particularly vague and may consequence to found excessive interpretations "if not" arbitrary ", underlines the referral of the deputies of the left.
"There is already a sanction regime against associations pursuing an object or carrying out an illegal activity", underline for their part the League of Human Rights (LDH), the Syndicate of the Magistracy, the Syndicate of Lawyers of France and several academics in an "external contribution" sent to the Sages.
- Article "Samuel Paty" -
Another attacked provision, the article says "Samuel Paty", target of a hate campaign on social networks before his assassination.
It provides that endangering the lives of others by disseminating information relating to private life "for the purpose of exposing him or her members of her family to a direct risk of harm to the person or person. property that the author could not ignore "will be punished by three years' imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros.
The left sees it as a way for the government to recycle the measure of the Comprehensive Security Law, censored in May by the Constitutional Council, aimed at prohibiting the "identification provocation" of the police.
"There is nothing to guarantee that such a provision would not be used as a pretext to place in custody any person filming a police intervention", underlines the referral.
On the right, it is above all the hardening of the right to family education that we want to see censored.
After brandishing the threat of an outright ban, the government finally amended its copy in the face of the risk of unconstitutionality pointed out by the Council of State and relaxed the grounds for allowing homeschooling.
© 2021 AFP