“This audience is curious,” blurts out the president of one of these cold correctional chambers of the Paris judicial court. At the bar, this Friday, November 22, a young farmer appears for “non-presentation before a parliamentary body”, a registered offense in the fine lines of the Constitutionto the paragraphs relating to the functioning of the National Assembly and the Senate. This is the first time, since the creation of this offense in 1977, that a French court has used this reason. “There is a legal debate above you”, concedes the magistrate to the defendant, behind whom dozens of supporters are crowded on the public benches.
The one who appears is none other than Léna Lazare, the very media spokesperson for the Earth Uprisings. With her counterpart Basile Dutertre – absent this Friday for professional reasons – she refused to appear twice in July and September 2023 before the parliamentary commission of inquiry of the National Assembly on “small groups perpetrators of violence” after the demonstrations against megabasins in Sainte-Soline. Enough to make the president of the commission at the time, the Les Républicains deputy Patrick Hetzel, today Minister of Higher Education and Research, jump. The right-wing elected official had decided to file a complaint against the two figures of the movement. A unique procedure “in the history of the Fifth Republic”, specifies one of the defendants’ lawyers, Me Matteo Bonaglia.
“The National Assembly has encroached on your power”
If the law provides for two years’ imprisonment and a fine of 7,500 euros for this offense, the prosecutor’s requisitions aroused the ire of the public, agitated in the narrow correctional room: two months’ suspended prison sentence for one, four months suspended for the other, accompanied by fines. And to top it all off, a two-year civil rights ban, stripping activists of their right to vote and eligibility.
“When we are summoned and we do not want to go there, when we do not want to discuss with the representatives of the Republic, we are absolutely no longer legitimate to exercise our rights,” she justifies. “There is a certain form of contradiction in accusing the defendants of not participating in democracy, while asking to withdraw their democratic rights,” pointed out to Me Matteo Bonaglia.
Did the parliamentary commission of inquiry even have a reason to exist? This is what the defense tried to dissect for two hours. Its creation, in parallel with a judicial investigation, is not legal according to the Constitution, especially since“there was a precise objective in the approach of the deputies: to investigate facts of a criminal nature”, underlines lawyer Raphaël Kempf. He continues, playing on the heartstrings: “The National Assembly has encroached on your power,” which represents a “violation of the separation of legislative and judicial powers”. An argument anticipated by the prosecutor and taken up in the opposite direction, in the event that the court deems this parliamentary investigation illegal: “Our parliamentary assemblies are autonomous and sovereign.”
“Why wasn’t Annie Ernaux summoned?”
The summons themselves also pose a problem for the defense. In particular the choice of people. If Léna Lazare and Basile Dutertre are identified among the general public as being part of the Earth Uprisings, they are not their representatives: the movement has no legal basis. It is neither an association nor a company. More than 150,000 people claim to be members of the collective, notably the anthropologist Philippe Descola, the filmmaker Cyril Dion and the writer Annie Ernaux. “Why wasn’t she summoned ?» quips Raphaël Kempf. The lawyer then drives the point home by reminding the court that the summons were sent to generic email addresses, without ensuring that they reached those concerned. “To be able to convict someone who has not appeared before an investigation, this person must actually have been summoned,” pointe Matteo Bonaglia.
But beyond procedural questions, it is the exercise of the right to remain silent that has been questioned. Unlike a judicial inquiry, where this fundamental right is assured, parliamentary inquiries, on the contrary, require people to take an oath and answer questions. An attack on freedom of expression, according to the lawyers, who highlighted various remarks from the European Court of Human Rights or the League for Human Rights.
“To be able to discuss the right to silence, you still have to appear for summons,” replies the prosecutor in a scathing tone. Very interested in the debates, and not seeming to want to deliberate hastily, the president made an appointment with the stakeholders on January 17, 2025 to make his decision known.
Source: www.liberation.fr
