France’s
draft counterterrorism bill is now in its final stretch before
becoming law. The fast-tracked bill is widely expected to pass a vote
in an extraordinary session of the National Assembly on October 3 –
despite concerns that it encroaches on people’s rights.
The
bill doesn’t prolong France’s two-year-long state of emergency,
which will formally be over when it becomes law.
What
it does is rather more unsettling. It takes elements of emergency
practices – intrusive search powers, restrictions on individuals
that have bordered on house arrest, closure of places of worship –
that have been used abusively since November 2015, and makes them
normal criminal and administrative practice. It does all this in a
way that weakens the judiciary’s control over and ability to check
against abuse in the way the new counterterrorism powers are used by
prefects, the Interior Ministry’s appointed delegates in each
region.
In
July, the Senate approved important improvements to the bill: a
sunset clause for the powers to stop existing in 2020, a requirement
for annual reporting on their use to parliament, and technical
changes mitigating the worst excesses of each proposed power.
But
the current version of the bill, after the debate in France’s lower
house, undoes many of these changes.
It
re-inserts vague language allowing prefects to order a mosque closure
on ill-defined grounds and sets out a harsher punishment if the
mosque isn’t closed. People whose liberty is restricted to a
specific area by a prefect’s order on national security grounds
must report more frequently to police stations. Also, these orders
can last much longer.
A
prefect can order an area to be locked down for increased searches
for up to a month – without an imminent threat. And it expands the
areas within which police can search people without a warrant to a
20-kilometer radius of ports, airports, and international train
stations – all this in a country where police have all too often
engaged in ethnic profiling during such stops.
One
analysis estimates that such extended powers could cover 28.6 percent
of French territory and 67 percent of its population.
To
some, these may seem like arcane technicalities or a small price to
pay for the hope of greater security. But everyone in France should
be worried about their rights when the executive branch of government
rushes laws through without proper legislative scrutiny, to give
itself greater powers without effective judicial control.
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