FRENCH REPUBLIC: Renewal of State of Emergency risks normalizing exceptional measures

23 Dec 2016

[International Secretariat]

Region: FRENCH REPUBLIC

Topic: Fight Against Terrorism and Human Rights

“With each renewal, the state of emergency slowly becomes the new norm, which is dangerous for a democracy based on rule of law,” said Nadim Houry, director of the terrorism and counterterrorism program at Human Rights Watch. “Given that terrorism will arguably remain a threat for the foreseeable future, the authorities should seriously reevaluate their reliance on exceptional measures and return to existing legal measures.”

Interior Minister Bruno Le Roux justified the extension request before the National Assembly, saying that the terrorist threat remained “extremely high.” He said there was a risk of attacks in the coming “intense electoral period” with the French presidential and legislative elections scheduled between April and June 2017.

Out of 95 people under house arrest as of December 6, 37 have been under house arrest for a year or more.

The government should further strengthen safeguards around the use of house arrest and raids to ensure that emergency powers are applied only to the extent strictly required while at the same time holding a wider discussion about the need to exit the state of emergency, Human Rights Watch said.

President Francois Hollande declared the state of emergency hours after the deadly Paris attacks of November 13, 2015, activating an emergency law created in 1955 during France’s war in Algeria, which grants vast powers to the interior minister and local government officials to search homes and other premises and restrict people’s movements without a judicial warrant.

According to the Parliamentary Commission in charge of overseeing the application of the state of emergency, French law enforcement officials have relied on the state of emergency in place since November 2015 to conduct 4,292 warrantless raids, 612 house arrests. These measures have led to only 61 terrorism-related criminal investigations, including only 20 under France’s broadly defined offense of “criminal association in relation to a terrorist undertaking”.

There are serious questions about the efficacy of the exceptional measures, Human Rights Watch said. The number of judicial procedures enacted as a result of the additional prerogatives is small in comparison with regular judicial procedures.

The Parliamentary Commission’s own report notes that raids conducted under the emergency rules have only contributed “modestly” to the work of the prosecutor’s counterterrorism unit.

France’s Conseil d’État, the country’s highest administrative court, warned in February, at the time of the second extension, that “a state of emergency remains a “state of crisis” that is inherently temporary.

“This extension threatens to turn a generalized security threat into grounds for a constant state of emergency,” said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International’s Europe Director. “The ongoing use of disproportionate sweeping executive powers, with few checks on their use, is resulting in a host of human rights abuses.

15 December 2016
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL PRESS RELEASE