“Global security” law: Agreement between deputies and senators allowing rapid adoption of the text (illustration) – A. GELEBART / 20 MINUTES
Deputies and senators reached an agreement on Monday on the controversial LREM bill on “global security”, which will be able to be definitively adopted shortly, parliamentary sources told AFP.
Its article 24, which must protect the police in operation but crystallized criticism, provoking an outcry among journalists, was notably rewritten. In line with what the Senate with a right-wing majority voted for, the parliamentarians meeting in a joint committee (CMP) have 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.
The Constitutional Council seized on article 24
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin reaffirmed that the government “trusted” Parliament for the drafting. The Constitutional Council will be seized of this article.
“Faced with death threats to which our police are too often victims, we are strengthening their protection by creating a new offense of provocation for the identification of an agent in intervention”, welcomed the leader. LREM deputies and former Minister of the Interior Christophe Castaner, in a statement sent to AFP. According to him, “this bill brings concrete progress, long awaited by the actors of our security”.
“Senators and deputies agreed on the need to strengthen the coordination of the security forces, to better protect the police, to allow the use of new technologies and to strengthen the structuring of private security”, also welcomes the upper room in a press release.
Easier use of police pedestrian cameras, drones during demonstrations, also 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.
Rewrite and “guarantees provided by senators”
It has aroused a strong mobilization since its first reading in the Assembly in the fall from organizations for the defense of freedoms and journalists’ unions, as well as from the left, all deeming this text “liberticidal”.
Article 24 had ignited the powder, to the point of provoking a political crisis between the executive and the majority. After a meeting at the Elysee Palace with Emmanuel Macron, the “total rewrite” of the controversial article was announced at the end of last year, even before the examination of the bill by the Senate.
Other “guarantees provided by the senators” were retained, they underline, citing the limitation “to the most serious offenses” of “the elimination of credits for reduction of sentence for the perpetrators of offenses committed against ‘an elected official, a policeman or a gendarme ”.
Assembly and Senate have yet to validate this compromise text, via two final votes, the dates of which have not yet been fixed.