Where is the Opposition?
These are worrying times for democracy in France. The extreme feebleness of the opposition is encouraging and allowing ministers to get away with far too much. The recent law on the recidivism of dangerous criminals is one example. Just after Christmas Rachida Dati, the Minister of Justice, who is not an elected member of parliament, published details of the bill, a supplement if you like to her earlier law on delinquent recidivists. The idea is that since even those criminals sentenced to life imprisonment are released after 15 or 20 years, and since a small number of them have, on release, committed further horrific crimes, there has to be a way of keeping those who do not seem safe locked up until they die.
Dati’s idea was to set up a group of experts to assess the really worst offenders as they reach the end of their stretch and decide whether or not they can ever be released or instead go to a secure prison/hospital for the rest of their lives. The idea that a non-judicial committee should be able to have a person locked up until his or her death, not for a specific crime already committed but for an unspecified one which they might or might not commit at some future unspecified date, jarred with many. Mme Dati addressed those worries and assured us that she was legislating for “between ten and fifteen dangerous criminals”. That small number, who many assumed would mean only the very worst of paedophiles, child murderers etc, re-assured many doubters, in particular the parliamentarians from her own party who would vote the bill through.
However on the 9th January, during the debate in the National Assembly and just hours before the vote, a couple of unannounced amendments were slipped in. They change the bill considerably so that it now affects any criminal already sentenced to 15 or more years for “atteinte à la personne”. In other words the new law is retro-active, and affects all those currently serving time for a serious crime. The Ministry of Justice cannot provide statistics for how many prisoners are in that category, but Le Canard Enchainé estimates in involves several thousand – certainly it will affect considerably more than “between ten and fifteen dangerous criminals”. The amendments were tacked on to the bill with a minimum of debate and the bill voted a few hours later, at 2.30 on the morning of January 10th in an almost empty Assemblée Nationale.
The worrying aspect, for me, is not that ministers try it on, but that the opposition is silent. Out-manouevred every time by the increasingly self-confident law-makers. Even afterwards nothing was said about, for example, that old French chestnut the rights of man. The new law may not make it through the Senate, or may be ground down by the Conseil Constitutionel because of its retroactive nature or because it sentences people to a lifetime in custody for crimes they have not committed and for which no court has found them guilty. But they won’t throw it out because of popular disapproval.