Constitutional Reform in Britain and France: From Human Rights to Brexit by Elizabeth Gibson-Morgan

Author:Elizabeth Gibson-Morgan [Gibson-Morgan, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General, Diplomacy
ISBN: 9781786831248
Google: 2L2rDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 34448288
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Published: 2017-09-15T07:42:31+00:00

Human rights under threat: a French state of emergency and British inroads into civil liberties

On 13 November 2015, eight suicide bombers triggered the bombs they carried around their waists to kill a maximum of civilians – mainly young people – around them in a famous concert hall in Paris known as the Bataclan, in Parisian cafés and restaurants in the fashionable Xth and XIIth districts, and outside the football stadium, the Stade de France, where the French President was attending an international match. These attacks claimed 130 lives and numerous casualties. After three days of official mourning when French flags were flown at half-mast, the national anthem sung at many public events and places, including universities, to pay homage to the victims and their families, François Hollande, the President of the Republic, who, under article 5 of the Constitution, is the guarantor of national independence, territorial integrity and the continuity of the French state as well as the functioning of the institutions, took the rare decision of assembling the two Houses of parliament – the National Assembly and the Senate – for a joint session as the French Congrès in Versailles.63 Taking the floor before parliament, he declared that France was at war, and that given the exceptional circumstances that the country faced in terms of imminent serious threats to the security of its citizens and its territory, exceptional measures were required. This war rhetoric was very different from his call for national unity, cohesion and solidarity after the massacre of the journalists of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015,64 but might be explained by the new scale of terrorist attacks which hit French people at random and where the President himself could have lost his life. Hollande thus declared that he would ask for the State of Emergency to be officially established – which would need urgent legislation and a revision of the constitution itself, as it does not include provisions for a ‘state of emergency’. The President called on the assembled law-makers to change the constitution in order to better protect French people and the country at large.

The President criticised current constitutional arrangements dealing with a ‘state of crisis’ as no longer adapted to the new exceptional circumstances, alluding more particularly to sections 16 and 36 of the constitution of the Fifth Republic. The first gives the President of the Republic full emergency powers when the functioning of the institutions, the territorial integrity and the independence of the nation are under serious and immediate threat, and was used by President de Gaulle to deal with the Algerian crisis in 1961. To his credit, President Hollande decided to use the 1955 law on the state of emergency rather than section 16 of the constitution, which would have given him the full powers as President of the Republic – that is to say, exceptional emergency powers. As for the second, it is a short, laconic though crucial article as it deals with the ‘state of siege’. It is

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