Very interesting; it looks like these people went to Syria to fight ISIS, and got this ill treatment when they returned.
Why does it seem like the French government is always supporting the worst actors in any conflict? ISIS is (was) so evil and barbaric, they make Putin seem like a great guy. Why would volunteering to fight them ever be seen in a bad light?
The monopoly on violence is the central component of the power of the state. This case undermines that power as much as violence used in self defence does, and is being prosecuted as passionately as self defence killings often are.
90% of self defense cases end in the tribunal, meaning that the judges saw it as not-self-defense. The biggest factor in all this is proportionality: if you killed someone in self defense but were not yourself having your life threatened, you will go to court.
Any physical assault is potentially life threatening. One unlucky fall on the pavement and that's it - you can easily die or become permanently disabled. Yet another reason why it's better to deescalate and/or run away if possible.
Macron recently said he was opposed to the entire concept of self defence, after a farmer shot a burglar in his home and was subsequently charged with murder.
After that remark became massively controversial he attempted to walk his statement back and claim that he just meant that he said he was against the presumption of self defence (which seems to imply he supports a presumption of guilt in self defence cases).
Basically every country in the world that has somewhat stable law and order has a history of prosecuting dubious self defence cases. The requirement for the state to have a monopoly on violence might sound edgy, but it’s not a controversial idea, it’s a requirement for being able to enforce the law. Self defence is an almost universally justifiable reason for a person to violate the monopoly, and it’s not hard to understand why government agencies can end up viewing it as an existential threat, not to the country or its people, but to their own institutions.
That podcast does have an interesting explanation of the idea, and Max Weber did provide interesting insights into it. But the governments exerting monopolistic control over violence (to differing levels at different times and places) goes back basically as far as organised society does. The legitimate claim to violence in self defence is just as ubiquitous and has always been at least philosophically at odds with the claim of the state. With that contention arise from the fact that a claim to violence in self defence must either arise from a failure of the state to perform its duties in upholding law and order, or a failure of the individual to follow the law. With the potential for controversy arising from the fact that it’s largely the state who gets to decide whether it was at fault, or if the individual in question was.
Again, you are excluding the critical phrase legitimate claim, which is at the heart of Weber's definition. That is, the right and legitimacy of that right, is restricted to the state, or an entity acting in the effective capacity of a state, whatever it happens to call itself.
Absent this, one of three conditions exist:
1. There is no monopoly. In which case violence is widespread, and there is no state.
2. There is no legitimacy. In which case violence is capricious.
3. Some non-state power or agent assumes the monopoly on legitimate violence. In which case it becomes, by definition The State.
You might want to consider what a "state" which lacks a monopoly on the legitimate claim to the monopoly on force would look like. To what other entity would it cede that legitimate claim, and/or how would it prevent other entities from enacting capricious violence, as has occurred from time to time in the world, and even now.
The state's claim is to legitimacy. A capricious exercise would be an abrogation of legitimacy
Weber, Max (1978). Roth, Guenther; Wittich, Claus (eds.). Economy and Society. Berkeley: U. California Press. p. 54.
The "monopoly on violence" or "monopoly on force" short-hands are a much more recent emergence, and seem to originate with Murray Rothbard (1960s) and Robert Nozick (1970s), though widespread usage of that phrase really only begins to take off after 1980, per Google's Ngram Viewer: <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=monopoly+on+vi...>
That shorthand has become quite popular, and is often cited by Libertarians as key to their adopting that particular ideology.[1] As expressed by them the formulation is both incorrect and misleading.
I think you’re really putting the kart before the horse here. It’s certainly not true that no legitimate governments existed prior to the 20th century, regardless of what particular phrases may be been invented to describe them during that time. Just like gravity existed long before Newton managed to come up with a sensible description of it. You also almost get to describing the actual reality of the situation, but not quite, which is that a monopoly on violence and a state are the same thing. All states emerged when some group attempted to assert a monopoly over violence, and whether they fail or succeed in becoming a state comes down to their ability to monopolise violence. The status of legitimacy here is entirely subjective, and if it’s called into question, the only way it’s ever falsified is if some other group successfully challenges that monopoly.
Or course the French government doesn't support ISIS, they also monitored everyone who fought for them. The problem is that these people are (supposedly) radicalised, and with active military experience (and probable related PTSD), not who they fought against.
In "pacific" Europe (specially in those countries where conscription is not mandatory) voluntarily taking weapons and going to a different country to kill people, no matter the reason, IS definitely considered radicalized, in the sense that it's very, very rare and "anti-social" behavior.
There are different directions in which one can be radicalised, not just ISIS style radical Islam. The group don't hide they were calling for revolution, which is pretty radical.
> And what exactly has France done to fight ISIS anyway?
Just sent an aircraft carrier, some ships and planes, and special forces. And intelligence. Contributed more than anyone outside of the US and local forces like YPG. Led one of the first coalitions that were extremely wide (including everyone from Bahrain through Belgium and Japan to Russia and China). But sure, you haven't heard about it, so they didn't do anything
> I guess that's a little better than what they did in Rwanda to support the genocide there
Wait, is France bad when it intervenes or when it doesn't intervene? In Rwanda they didn't "support" the genocide of course, just didn't do much to stop it after supporting the faction that commited it before.
They are far-left activists who went to fight alongside Kurdish militias of the YPG, a group affiliated with the PKK, considered a terrorist organisation by the European Union.
That is why they were put under surveillance when they came back to France.
Ultimately it's a bit more complicated than good people fighting versus evil people (and as far as I'm concerned, they were effectively fighting for a US proxy against another US proxy).
>Why would volunteering to fight them ever be seen in a bad light?
In part, because the YPG is seen by the french state as a terrorist group, for various political reasons, and also because having leftists trained in handling weapons is seemingly more terrifying to the government than having neonazis trained in handling weapons. Make of that what you will.
Someone taking weapons somewhere (regardless of the cause) is always a dangerous person. Regular soldiers included and the government treat them as such. It's an unfortunate position (of course) if that person is fighting on "your" side.
Yes, but the problem here is not that, it's the arguments used to build the case.
They have not been any evidence of criminal activities by those people. So far, all what they have against them is "they are protective about their privacy".
That's a terrible reason to arrest and maintain people in jail.
It's grounds for having your citizenship revoked unless it will render you stateless. People suspected of being on the way to Syria would get their passports confiscated.
Nine EU countries made similar rules, though I don't know how many still have it in effect. Any citizen/resident of Denmark is still prohibited from going to the conflict zones of Syria and Iraq.
Because government's really don't like their citizenry knowing how to apply violence, unless it's done through government controlled activities (ie military, police).
A cynical person would say it's because corrupt leaders are afraid of potential consequences for their actions. But there's likely other, more mundane reasons too. :)
There are basically two sides to this conflict: ISIS on one hand, and the Syrian/Kurdish PYD/YPG side on the other. The latter has ties to the PKK, which is an internationally recognized terror org just like ISIS.
Now, depending on who you ask, the PYD/YPG is "good, because they fight ISIS" (e.g. the official stance of the US) or "Terrorists, because they are basically just extensions of the PKK" (what Turkey says).
This leads to a lot of inconsistency in foreign policy within NATO. For example Sweden is pressured to crack down on PYD/YPG to be admitted into NATO. The US, like many others, have supported the YPG/PYD in the fight against ISIS. So I imagine Turkey is also pressuring other NATO countries like France in this case, to go after PKK collaborators including the adjacent syrian orgs.
So basically: why are the people volunteering to fight ISIS seen as terrorists within NATO? I'd guess these days to a large extent because Turkey says so.
Hmm, let me check in again with France… Oh, what, they have a thing called the Foreign Legion, where they want foreigners to fight for them? It seems like actually France wants people to fight for nations that aren’t their own.
I'm French, I know the foreign legion, we accept foreigners in our army, it doesn't mean we accept our own citizen to fight for foreign parties, especially non state armies, they're not mutually exclusive, there is no logical connection between your two statements
From a moral viewpoint, letting someone of your country join another country’s foreign legion is identical to letting someone of another country join your foreign legion. If you say that joining a different group to fight ISIS is not okay while joining France to fight France’s enemies is okay, then you’re saying that ISIS is a better group in the world than France’s enemies.
Viewing with suspicion someone who volunteers to fight in a foreign war does not imply support for any party in that war. We can criticize the French government but it’s an extreme exaggeration to suggest that they support ISIS.
The French version (readable with a translation extension) does, but it's just one of a long list of things including GrapheneOS, LineageOS, Jitsi, FDroid, Tor, RiseupVPN, etc.
uBlock Origin itself gave me oh what the fuck reaction but seems its gone now; text has been fixed already. No information on time of the edit was provided.
Perhaps they reverted article back because an hour ago I was checking French text (thus my comment) in a new private window and uBlock wasn't mentioned and now indeed, it's there
The key is that, while there is suspicion (the people arrested have a far left ideology, have been to Syria to fight against the Islamic state, own weapons and encrypt all of their communications), there is no crime nor proof of an intent to commit a crime.
These people have been sent to prison because they are suspicious, not because of an action they have done (something made possible as a special case of an older antiterrorism law). And, amongst other things, using Signal and Linux with the encryption-on settings are explicitly listed as some of the things making them suspicious in the eyes of the law.
There's no freedom more fundamental than freedom of thought, but anti-encryption violates that imo. At least, it prevents the sharing or workshopping of thoughts. Yeah, I'd literally die on that hill.
No one deserves to be subject to my raw, unrefined thoughts. It's hell enough for me
It really is such a hill, I know it may sound absurd to some people, but invasion of privacy and communications is, by all means, thought policing, and living in such a world is, in my opinion, torture.
The law doesn't say being suspicious is criminal, but that organising with the intent to commit terrorism is, and that's what the prosecutor's will have to prove.
The real, actual problem is the unlawful detention.
> And, amongst other things, using Signal and Linux with the encryption-on settings are explicitly listed as some of the things making them suspicious in the eyes of the law.
In combination with other things, and in this article there are quotes from interrogations which explicitly ask "have you organised illegal activities through encrypted chat communications".
Yeah, as much as saying 'using encrypted communications' is a very cheap shot by the prosecution, this seems to be the gist of it, the combination and the organization
It's understandable yet sad that actively fighting against reactionnary movements puts you on a watchlist. Freedom fighters being equated to terrorists once again...
Part of the snowden documents revealed that anyone who had ever visited the Tor web site, not even downloading the client, was on one of the NSAs "lists"
Another problem is how people define civil rights. We're past the point when „civil rights“ or „human rights“ had an universal meaning.
You want democracy? Good. You want to limit corporations to make sure small businesses stand a fair chance? Ok. You want to touch personal property, cancel opponents or abolish borders/police/military/etc? Russian boat that way.
> abolish borders/police/military/etc? Russian boat that way.
Ah yes, Soviet Russia, known for... Uh... Not having borders, police, or military.
Come on man. Not all far left ideologies are authoritarian, there's a whole authoritarian-libertarian axis. Many far leftists hate authoritarians, including left wing authoritarians like state socialists, as much as you do.
Soviet Russia did abolish many borders, police forces and militaries... To enforce their own :)
So far I've met two types of far-left. Flat-out authoritarians. Or „non-authoritarians“ who stay silent on implementation of their ideas. Probably because their ideas can be implemented (and, more importantly, kept in place) either authoritarian methods. Or full support in society, which is unrealistic.
No, no, we're already down the slope and going fast, we are now at "dissolve informal ecologist organizations and raid their homes and families with antiterrorist groups and gear for the crimes of blocking some construction", "get friendly with neonazi groups and let them parade in Paris, let them attack prides and leftist bars".
> There was no neonazi group parading in Paris; the GUD did their annual march to honour the memory of one of theirs killed by the police 20 years ago.
So there was no neonazi group parading, but there was a neonazi group parading.
> Comparatively, the far left is arrested for actual violent actions.
There was none in this case. On the other hand, the far right is responsible for several assault in Bordeaux and Lyon, was prosecuted in Nantes for beating up nearly to death two far left teenager, murdered Féderico Martin Aramburu, burned the house of the Saint Brévin mayor, attacked and firebombed a LGBT center in Tour, ...
> the people arrested have a far left ideology, have been to Syria to fight against the Islamic state, own weapons and encrypt all of their communications
Is there a place where we can read more about this? The article seems to explain none of that context, it only purports that people are suspicious and can be arrested for simply having good 'digital hygiene'.
Edit: Some relevant passages from TFA
> Likewise, the critical attitude towards technologies, and in particular to Big Tech (Google, Amazon, Facebook Apple and Microsoft, GAFAM), is considered as a sign of radicalisation. Among the questions asked to the defendants, one can read: Are you anti-GAFA?”, “What do you think of GAFA?” or “Do you feel a certain reserve towards communication technologies?”.
> These questions are to be read in light of one report from the DGSI titled “The ultra-left movement”, which states that “members” of this movement are alledgedly showing “a great culture of secrecy […] and a certain reserve towards technology”.
I don't know how you jumped from "privacy" to "desire to be alone", those two things are barely related. Locking the toilet door isn't antisocial and talking to someone in private isn't either.
I don't know about this concrete case (and my french is not good enough to find out with ease) - but the context is likely, that they joined the YPG at some point.
It was/is a weird situation. They are very anticapitalist and marxist with some anarchist elements, but they got western support when they were fighting ISIS (and to some extent Assad/Putin) in Syria.
So in Syria communist rebells got US weapons and I believe US troops are still on the ground helping them. But back home in the west, those activists get prosecuted, because the PKK (the mother organisation of YPG) is considered a terrorist organisation (and likely they still are doing terrorism, even though it is of course a "separate" organisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdistan_Freedom_Hawks)
I believe the French Wikipedia page[0] is the most comprehensive place to get information on the subject. There is also a, much shorter, English page[1].
Yesterday the French government dissolved an environmental movement (which I don't like btw), amongst the reasons stated[0] are that they leave their phones at home or switch them off, refuse to talk to the police when arrested, or even that they organize their protest over the internet.
When accused of authoritarian tendencies the government usually answers "go to China or North Korea to see what a dictatorship is like".
Honestly the west wanted for China to be more like us but in the end our power hungry politicians made us more like China. And we are on track to be even worse because there are some morons who are actually in favor of police state and “democratically” vote to be policed by the goverment and their cronies.
I was thinking about an uber or courier service that takes your phone for a walk
Pretty much relying on the assumption that investigators will find stationary phones suspicious when they spy on you
Could put them in those charging lockboxes seen as airports and festivals, the infrastructure is already there
Guess I’ll market it to climate activists in europe lol
edit: maybe those delivery robots are even better couriers, since it fits the idea of getting a courier to come back to you better than an uber on the other side of town. risky but the fun kind.
Put your device in front of a vertical metallic plan and have it vertically rotating slowly. You are now walking around your house. Wouldn't this work?
Given most activists are at university or are associates with university attendees, you should target it to students. One downside would be that it would only work within term time.
Yep. But this is not exactly new. The Macron government is now using "anti-terror" legislation that was passed by both left and right-wing governments over the past 20 years or so.
I'm really curious as to why Macron govt is looked up to by a lot of Americans. American citizens, with all of the country's flaws, tends to have a lot more inherent civil rights than most of these governments.
I think it is more about fear silences sane people. Not that support for shady things increase. E.g. at work like 2 or 3 out of 20 are phsycotic war mongers to different degrees. There is always this implied "we will shoot you as a traitor if you disagree" if things turn to shit when you deal with that kind of people.
I think France is generally perceived here to have more progressive social policies regarding labor, education, healthcare and the environment. The limited media coverage I've seen about French elections seemed to paint Macron as the candidate more representative of those values.
Macron is not a fan of theses social policies, he is right leaning.
His governement reduced labor protections, butchered educations, worsened public healthcare, and do nothing for the environment.
Im not arguing the point. It's a sad state of affairs. But Le Pen was painted here as a female version of Trump. So that's why Macron was perceived as representative of French progressiveness.
The vote (for president) still came down to, "Guy who thinks protecting the workers is the end of the world" or "Lady who seems way too comfortable with actual nazi parties", so americans just had a lot of empathy.
Economically right-leaning but culturally left-leaning, he's let in tens of thousands of migrants, does not expel them (cf. the "OQTF" stories pretty much every day), and on top of that, uses taxpayers money to fund them throughout the country.
You are mixing up stuff to fit your scenario.
OQTF stories are up to police incompetence, not lax imposed by the governement.
Culturally left-leaning if very bold given the recent pension reform debacle, bypassing any democratic recourse.
Also very bold statement given the police repression of mosts of the protests.
There is nothing Macron that is left leaning, relative to France politic spectrum.
>> Interesting. Right-leaning governement (if not "far-right" according to some), but has no control over illegal migrants routinely roaming around committing crimes. I thought a key marker of "the right" was being (too) strict on order and ruthless implementation of the law.
Macron, as so many French leaders before him, is in fact obsessed by transforming France into the US.
Sarkozy, his most alike predecessor, used to wear a t-shirt that said "NYPD" while jogging, as he was president of France; and later renamed his party "Les Républicains" as an hommage to US Republicans (!!?!)
This was 9 years ago, so right before Trump happened. At the time, 53% of party members thought it was "too American" but they accepted the change nonetheless.
Macron pushes through "liberal" reforms (liberal in Europe means the opposite as in the US: liberals here are free-market proponents) because he thinks it will make France great again, I guess.
You always get only a really tiny window of information, selected by your medias, about foreign countries. (It doesn't matter which receiving country you are in, it is a general principle, not just about the USA).
In France, we almost only hear about other countries politics when there is a chance for a far right party to gain something. As far as all other domains are concerned, we may from time to time get a funny/shocking miscellaneous news item, and that's it.
Also, images/stereotypes about a country last a long time, long after they have stopped being true.
Ironically, perhaps the only emitting country that differs a bit is... the USA, for probably most countries over the planet are flooded with information and contemporary culture from the USA.
For example, to get back a bit to the original subject, people may know the American police and justice system better than their own. Like, French people when they are arrested would believe that they have enforceable rights and that rigorous processes are respected. Ah!
Once, in custody, I even had the impudence of requesting a lawyer as I was allowed to. LOL, no way. And it is not simply a problem of a rotten police: the prosecutor, the judges, they are all covering this up, it is the whole police+justice system which 'works' like this.
I have had well-educated French acquaintences telling me for a decade that France is ripe for a new system of government; the 6th in its history.
Many current problems stem from the fact that post-war mechanisms written into the governmental system are abused by the president and elected leaders. E.g. presidential overruling of parlamental votes.
We celebrate the revolution and throwing out the king while basically electing a new one every five years that will magically solve all of our problems.
We celebrate the revolution while ignoring it went terribly, being in terms of rights, economy or basically anything else, and we happily put an emperor on the throne less than a decade later
> we happily put an emperor on the throne less than a decade later
to be fair, the emperor climbed on the throne pretty much on his own; I think he had support across broad parts of the population, but it's not as if he was elected (and he didn't even start as an emperor, that came a few years after his coup)
> I did not steal the crown. I found it lying in the gutter, and I picked it up with the sword. But it was the people who placed it on my head.
The man was massively popular with the populace [1] [2] and he got elected emperor with a referendum [3] to which 7 million people were called. By modern standard that barely qualifies, but for an emperor in 1804 ...
A common misconception was that the revolution was to remove the all powerful head of state. It wasn't, the people just wanted a competent one and improved living conditions.
I wouldn't say it went terribly in terms of rights, necessarily. The French Revolution was a massive influence on every other post-enlightenment democracy that came after it. Without the French Revolution (and yes, that includes its failures), we very well could all still be living in different versions of feudalism.
The French Revolution paved the way for just about every pro-worker reform in the modern world.
yup. thats why some folks love to call the current political system a "presidential monarchy", due to the overreaching executive powers granted to the president of the republic.
> I have had well-educated French acquaintences telling me for a decade that France is ripe for a new system of government
First, this is not "well-educated French acquaintences" so much as it is supporters of Melanchon's LFI political party, who explicitely campaign on the idea of ending the 5th republic to start a 6th where all problem would be magically solved.
Second, the reason I hate his proposal, is because he explicitely refuses to give any specific detail on what the 6th republic would be. He claims it would be "decided by the public" but there is no reason why a pre work couldn't be done BEFORE. In effect, he pretends to be saying "we will end the 5th for a better 6th", but what he's actually saying is "let's end the one we have now instead of fixing it, and replace it with something I will have the power to decide, you must accept to throw it away without knowing what you will get in exchange or how it will be made but trust me it will totally be better and I will totally let the people decide".
Our 5th republic might be flawed, but I'm not putting it in the trash without any idea of what we will get in return, that's brexit referendum level of flawed.
And I will always be weary of someone who claims to have a simple solution to a complex problem, on the condition that I give him power over me, especially if another condition is that I cannot know what said solution is before making my decision.
Third,
> the 6th in its history
Would be the 6th republic sure, but absolutely not the 6th "system of government", it would be like our 25th or something ?
Given that out of the dozen or so "main political parties" he is the only one who wants that, and that when asked about their priorities for the change of France no group of frenchmen put that in their top 5 besides voters of LFI ...
You're absolutely right that there are definitely some people who want a 6th republic but do not vote or agree with LFI, but for the sake of generalized conversation like we're having now they're mostly irrelevant. If it were to happen, it would be through him and his "vision", and as such I maintain my critics.
Beware of what you want for you might just get it.
I’d add that the mentioned acquaintances apparently aren’t calling for a 6th republic.
Just believe that the country is "ripe for it" because of repeated abuses of the, exceptionally large for a western democracy, presidential powers.
But people have been dissatisfied with that ever since the last constitution was enacted. Including, famously, Mitterrand, who despite his many earlier criticisms (describing the 5th republic as "Le Coup d’État Permanent" [1], which could be translated to "The Continuous Coup") was prompt to fully enjoy those powers once elected himself.
I’m sorry but it’s more than the left. Even right and centrists people who were ok with the retirement reform are saying that they don’t accept how it have been forced on the parliament.
It was one of the most important and most protested reform of the last decades and the president / government used every constitutional breach they could to avoid any vote from people's representatives.
Charles de Courson, who tried to force the vote by proposing an abrogation of the law to the parliament is not really a leftist, he was even going to vote himself in favor of the reform.
We, the French, elected a parliament where Macron didn’t have the absolute majority and Macron tries everything he can to avoid the parliament when he know he will not have enough votes. It’s a democracy crisis wether you are from the left or from the right because Macron is interpreting the constitution like he can dismissal the parliament when he wants although most French didn’t vote for his party.
The fifth republic is the result of a coup by a military leader (De Gaulle) that was in talks with commanders of tank divisions to drive to Paris should he not be instated president and allowed to write his own constitution (written by Pierre Debré, a friend of his).
Calling it a coup is highly debatable and debated. It happened outside of the scope of what the 4th happened, and it happened because the 4th had broken down and was not working anymore.
It should be noted that some of the main people who called to view it as a coup were people from other parts of the political spectrum who had other ideas of how it should happen and who should end up in power, including Mitterand (who ended up president of the 5th in 1986). These people however were also for the end of the 4th.
The military guys from Algeria had already put their hands on Corsica, plus, the iminent threat of the landing on the shores of Southern France (or via an aerial operation, can't remember exactly) of said military forces was heavily used by de Gaulle during the negotiations that got him into power.
For those who can read French and who would want to learn more about this I heartily recommend the recently published Gouverner la France [1] (Governing France), a collection of books written by Michel Winock as part of the prestigious Quarto Gallimard series.
It includes titles like L'Agonie de la IVème République (Agony of the Fourth Republic), La fièvre hexagonale : les grandes crises politiques de 1871 à 1968 (Hexagon Fever: Major Political Crises from 1871 to 1968) and a pretty good biography of de Gaulle. It's from that book that I learned of all the craziness of 1958, the one that involved general Salan (who would be sentenced to death a few years after that for trying a coup against de Gaulle) and all.
I assume they were alluding to the fact that the current French state is called the “Fifth Republic” but there were various non-Republic regimes as well so it would actually be more than the 6th “system of government”.
They have not been dissolved because they left their phone at home, they have been dissolved because it was a violent organisation that was systematically attacking the police and destroying property.
And given the sort of stuff they brought to their protests: swords, machettes, baseball bats, jerrycan, bricks, fireworks, petanque balls, Molotov cocktails, fire bombs, etc, it is particularly disingenuous to pretend they have been dissolved for not talking to the police when arrested.
The total value of items destroyed has been estimated to be about 8 million by the French state. While not a small number, I haven't seen the antiterrorist police be sent to the FNSEA's headquarters for their history of violence and destruction ever since 1960. It is part of their methods ever since their inception, but greasing some palms high up in the government certainly helps.
>And given the sort of stuff they brought to their protests: swords, machettes, baseball bats, jerrycan, bricks, fireworks, petanque balls, Molotov cocktails, fire bombs, etc, it is particularly disingenuous to pretend they have been dissolved for not talking to the police when arrested.
Violence. Is. Caused. By. The. Police. None of these, not a single one of these items were used until the police started indiscriminately tear gassing thousands of protesters, the vast majority of them peaceful. Five thousand grenades and weapons classified as war weapons used on protesters. Half of the items you mention were taken by the police with roadblocks more than twenty kilometers away. Sorry for driving with petanque balls in my trunk, I guess.
Sure, let's read the sexual abuser, the national-socialist-journal-writing sack of shit's declaration. One part in particular is very interesting:
Considérant d'autre part que le groupement SLT diffuse a ses membres et sympathisants, via ses réseaux sociaux, des modes opératoires directement inspirés de ceux des <<Black Blocks>>; que parmi ces préconisations figurent le port de tenues interdisant leur identification par les forces de l'ordre, en contradiction avec les habitudes des militants écologistes de manifester a visage découvert, le fair de laisser son téléphone mobile allumé a son domicile ou de le mettre en <<mode avtion>> en arrivant sur les lieux de la manifestation pour éviter le bornage, le fait de ne pas communiquer les codes dévérrouillage de l'appareil ou de ne pas répondre aux forces de l'ordre en cas d'interpellation; qu'y figurent également des consignes d'ordre médical <<en cas de nécessité d'hospitalisation, dans la mesure du possible, se rendre dans un hôpital éloigné de l'action, rester flou, ne pas donner son identité, prévoir de l'argent liquide>>; que par ailleurs est préconisé le port du masque FFP3; de lunettes de protection contre les gaz; ...
For the HNers that to not have the privilege to read the beautiful language of the country of Human Rights, where protesters get arbitrarily arrested in the hospital and in their homes, this is a translation of how they justify being a single step below "declaring ecologist protestors an actual terrorist group":
Considering that the SLT group spreads to its members and sympathizers through social networks, operative modes directly inspired from those of <<Black Blocks>>; that amongst those suggestions include wearing outfits preventing their identification by the police forces; in contradiction with the habit of protesting with their face out usually had by ecologist protestors; the fact of leaving their mobile phones turned on in their homes or to put them in airplane mode when arriving at the protest to avoid triangulation; to refuse to communicate their passwords or to refuse to respond to the police when being arrested; that also contains medical related orders: <<in case of hospitalization, as much as possible, go to a hospital far away from the action, stay quiet, do not give your identity, have some cash>>; that wearing FFP3 masks and gas protection glasses is recommended...
Want to add some more ? Sure. They arrested an EELV member that was not present at any of the protests. Why ?...
> Violence. Is. Caused. By. The. Police. None of these, not a single one of these items were used until the police started indiscriminately tear gassing thousands of protesters, the vast majority of them peaceful. Five thousand grenades and weapons classified as war weapons used on protesters.
It's obvious violence must have existed from both side.
It's a bit obvious you're from the far left, just be neutral.
I didn't mean him to be neutral in his position but in what he is writing. You can clearly see he is biaised and is anti-police. Like the police is responsible of everything and that people are peaceful protesters while it's not truth, it's not black and white and he is a fool to believe that.
They're voicing their position in writing. There's no way to make that "neutral" unless they have a neutral position. Of course someone on the left is going to write like they're on the left. Likewise, someone on the right is going to write like they're on the right. There's no incentive for people to take the time to neuter their writing just because you disagree with how they stated things. It's not impossible that this is a "black and white" kind of thing in their mind, right?
So now you're deflecting by "both sides"-ing the issue. Do you not hold the police to a higher standard? It's pretty telling you have to assume the political leanings of the person you're responding to rather than engaging with the argument or quantifying your position.
It's completely unacceptable for any police force to use "crowd control" devices that are explicitly disallowed in warfare under the Geneva Accords. Full stop.
I didn't mean him to be neutral in his position but in what he is writing. You can clearly see he is biaised and is anti-police. Like the police is responsible of everything and that people are peaceful protesters while it's not truth, it's not black and white and he is a fool to believe that.
But you cannot blame them for the violence in the protest they co-organized. People are free to attend the protest, and they cannot control them. They never called for violence against police. And most protest now in France have some people fighting with the police.
The same way you can see firefighters throwing stuff (including petanque ball) to police during firefighers protest. But you cannot blame the firefigheter union for this.
Depend which kind of Neo-Nazi organization (they are illegal in France and most of them in France do like to punch people and say it), and co-organized with whom, and depend on what is saying these Neo-Nazi
But for sure I do blame Neo-Nazi for being Neo-Nazi !
A significant majority (67%) of the currently active low ranking French police force (not counting the retirees) vote, or at least declare they intend to, for one the parties that has historically been as right wing as one can be.
Taking that into account, one could have reasons to believe cops wouldn’t be as tough on protesting fascists, and that protesting fascists wouldn’t be as violent towards cops.
Though I’d be curious to see wether or not facts support this hunch.
Myself, I'm a peaceful guy, if every protest I called (assuming I'm a "leader" of cause $INSERT_CAUSE_HERE ) resulted in violence, I would not call any more protests because that would go against my personal values. So it's hard to believe a group is peaceful if every time they have a protest it turns into a riot.
Then you could not organize any "leftist" protest in France :-) Note that they do destroy stuff, they just don't call violence against people. And definitely don't turn in riot every time
> Again, accidents happen, but if you are the catalyst over and over again it's on you.
Technically, it "is on" whoever objectively plays a role in the underlying causality.
You "may" be referring to your perception of what is going on, as opposed to what is actually going on (which is unreachable).
>> This seems objectively reductive and represents ideological beliefs as objective facts.
> No, you just didn't liked that thing you like got attacked for the thing they did and are making up excuses.
Except I have the ability to describe the various ways in which it is (at least plausibly) objectively reductive and represents ideological beliefs as objective facts, whereas you have a much harder problem: proving that you can actually read my mind (or, are omniscient).
> Again, accidents happen, but if you are the catalyst over and over again it's on you.
Yeah, they "accidentally" carried swords, firebombs and molotov cocktails to a protest. It was an honest mistake, right? I mean, those are normal things people carry around on a daily basis, aren't they?
So should we apply the same thinking with police constantly inciting violence at protests ? At this point anytime there's a major protest in France, I consider it a win if no one in the crowd lost an eye, hand or worse, their life, from the grenades thrown by police.
So we should forbid firefighter and farmer's union ? And all leftist union ? And we should forbid any protest where people using black block technique could agree with ?
In France, in most of the cases you don't need police officer for it, some people are willing to donage bank or fight with the police (especially after police overreacting, or being violent for free)
The fact is you don't know how will end up protest... And even when a protest end up damaging 1 mac donalds and 2 banks, most people are pacific protester... The question is how do you handle this in a democracy ?
The responsibility is 100% on the police. They're the ones who are systematically coming armed to 100% of protests, they're the one gouging people eyes out, pushing people in rivers, causing limbs to be amputated, they're the ones who murdered my 80 yo neighbor during a protest. The ratio of police vs protestors injuries is about 1 vs 10.
Protesting for the survival of the planet we're all living on is not a crime it's a necessity to not go extinct.
Okay, so if the government ever wants to shut anything down for any reason, get a few dozen goon squad members to show up as fellow protestors with weapons and cause property damage and smack cops around a little bit?
The Home Office is looking for ways to reduce knife crime. We suggest that banning the sale of long pointed knives is a sensible and practical measure that would have this effect.
Maybe this is like a logic bomb but for authoritarians. Try to convince Macron or random police officers that they too are _potential_ terrorists and watch them go cross eyed.
As others have mentioned, context matters a lot. The arrested group came back from Syria (where they fought alongside YPG against ISIS) radicalised, and were monitored ever since then. Their alleged crime isn't using Signal, it's just that a French anti-terrorism law allows to be arrested for "organisation with the intent to commit terrorist acts", which the DGSI(internal intelligence services) claims a radicalised group of people calling for a revolution, using encrypted communications, having a bunch of hunting weapons and ammunition, and materials for explosives is. A big stretch on the surface, but they were monitoring them for years, so who the hell knows what else they have.
The real problem is the unlawful detention of one of the men, for which a court finally intervened and he has been freed under surveillance.
It should be very clear IMHO; they have nothing, if they caught the group with "a bunch of hunting weapons and ammunition" then they can arrest them for that and that'd be a lot more serious ground for the argument of "intent to commit terrorist acts".
Since it seems they don't have anything, they are criminalizing normal tools and dev tools because your average reader/citizen doesn't know the difference between a hacker and a cracker, let alone the right of privacy vs conspiring. The only nice thing IMHO is that everyone uses Whatsapp and no one considers it "criminal", so by bundling Signal etc together with Whatsapp they are making themselves look like they are exaggerating for the average person.
Depending on when it occurred, traveling into Syria could be a crime in itself. France and other EU countries banned the travel to Syria unless you were associated with a limited number of groups(humanitarian, journalism, diplomatic mission etc.). Joining any warring party was explicitly prohibited.
> As others have mentioned, context matters a lot.
No, it does not. While this group is indeed suspicious, detaining them without a proof (and using whatsapp as your proof) opens a serious precedent. Now anyone can be detain for that. And it'll be used for serious suspicious cases later but also will be used against someone like you because someone in the police didn't like how you walk.
Of note for US readers, France legal system is not a jurisprudential system as in the US. That is, a judge's ruling does not become law - i.e must be followed as law by another judge -, only parliament can make law.
The only instance having a form of jurisprudence power is Cour de Cassation, but that's only indirect: being the ultimate instance of recourse CCass rulings for similar cases have high chances of having similar outcomes. They may (or may not) influence other court rulings but a) they are not law and b) reaching to CCass is not guaranteed, so other courts judges are completely free to rule differently (as long as they abide by law)
That said, holistically these precedents matter as they may give broad strokes on mindset trends from the powers at play.
Isn't that always the case when you have rule of law and separation of powers? The legislative body comes up with the law; judges just apply it.
E.g. if the law says "murder carries a penalty of minimum 5 years and maximum 30 years imprisonment", then a judge cannot give a sentence of 4 year or of 40 years, even if they personally believe this to be a "better" sentence.
My understanding of the US system design is that the law as defined by the legislative body is in a way "minimalistic" (and even more so at the federal level), and jurisprudence augments it with the details.
Taking your example, what constitutes murder and minimum and maximum penalty are defined in "broad strokes", and the judge gets to define "in this specific case that person is guilty in a way where they should be sentenced to X years", and that becomes law (IIUC scoped to their jurisdiction), progressively refining and tuning the whole system, because the next judge faced with a similar enough case would be bound by it. The lawyer game is then to argue whether the current case is close enough to a previous one for the previous ruling to match (and thus tying the judge's hands). A thoughtful US judge would consider both the case at hand and the implications of being law-generating when issuing a ruling.
> My understanding of the US system design is that the law as defined by the legislative body is in a way "minimalistic" (and even more so at the federal level), and jurisprudence augments it with the details.
Which really makes me wonder, how the hell to even professionals keep track of that? For regular stuff you literally can have thousands of relevant cases going back centuries as "precedent" to build on.
IANAL but no, the US claim to minimalism is just branding.
The largest jurisdiction like the Federal judiciary, for example, have the Federal Sentencing Guidelines which have a strict point system for criminal sentencing where judges have little discretion due to a Federal “tough on crime” wave.
It really depends on the subfield of law and the vagueness of past legislation.
Yes. In such cases a reasonable judge ultimately aim to bring justice but can only do so within the confines of law. I recall talking to a few who had to rule in terrible ways (e.g remove a child from one's parent custody because of known but obsolete and largely unrelated past records and granting exclusive rights to the other who was known abusive but had only hearsay to back it up) and took every possible course of action to mitigate and make it less unjust but had their hands tied. They were all experiencing unfathomable psychological distress.
The law is the law, if it's unfair it gets changed.
Having the judge "making it up" as he goes, and then another judge using that sentence 120 years later as precedent like in american courts sounds insane
Townshend v Townshend is a ruling from 1848 still being quoted.
Citing Slavery Project did an analysis and found 18% of all current cases in courts either quote slavery rulings or are less than 2 steps removed (quote a ruling that quotes the slavery ruling).
I mean Spain recently had a big case related to a group sexual assault. Society was up in arms about the ruling (minimum sentence was 1 year, max was like 6)
So the law was amended and now sexual violence has a maximum sentence of 15 years which is more in line with other european countries.
The law, as it's written down, often fails to match closely the particular circumstances of a specific case. Maybe it never gives an exact match. So judges and juries have to interpret the law. That's the reality, whatever legal system you have.
"Precedent" is a way of saving the time of courts and lawyers, by not having to argue the same details every time they come up. And it's not as if every court judgement becomes a precedent; only higher courts can set precedents, and they can only be overturned by higher courts still.
I think this is a reasonable way of approaching justice.
All of that is easy to contemplate. You have extenuating and aggravating circumstances (things that make the situation worse or better for the defendant)
And on top of that you have a window for sentencing. So if murder is lets say 4-20 years in jail. And you were drunk, that makes it worse, but it was not premeditated, and this and that it all adds up and you might 6 years or you might get 18 depending on the circumstances.
This also allows the law to be rewritten from scratch instead of being based on whatever higher court thought in the 1800s.
> You have extenuating and aggravating circumstances
You do; but that's not actually what I was thinking about. That's just about sentencing, and here (the UK) sentencing doesn't fall within the purview of precedent; there are sentencing guidelines set by senior members of the judiciary.
I was thinking of actual points of law, such as what constitutes unreasonable behaviour, or whether possession of some quantity X of illegal drugs is conclusive evidence of intent to supply.
> whatever higher court thought in the 1800s
It's open to higher courts to overturn precedents, if they've become outdated to the extent they no longer make sense. The very old precedents are presumably precedents that make so much sense that nobody has successfully challenged them. If someone runs into an adverse judgement based on an ancient precedent that is unsupportable, no doubt there's some barrister that would like to make their case (and their reputation) at appeal, by overturning it.
> I was thinking of actual points of law, such as what constitutes unreasonable behaviour, or whether possession of some quantity X of illegal drugs is conclusive evidence of intent to supply.
In Roman judiciary those are usually part of the law as written. So instead of having a law about "unresonable behaviour", you have a law explicitely stating that "making noise above X db at night is illegal" or "drinking in the street is illegal" etc. So the idea of what constitutes intent to supply is based on quantity, anything below X grams is personal use etc.
And you can always add aggravating circumstances that "promote" a crime, so you can have such thing as intent to supply counts having drugs and X amount of money on you, or X amount of drugs and leaflets saying you sell etc. In other words you can explicitely state the kind of things judiciary precedent would probably take into account ahead of time.
> The very old precedents are presumably precedents that make so much sense that nobody has successfully challenged them.
Or the higher courts have not taken a case that challanges them. I am not sure about the UK but in the US, the supreme court pretty much picks their cases which means they can arguably allow for dangerous precedent to stay as long as needed by avoiding cases they know would present a resonable chance of overturning. Or equally dangerous oversee cases that maliciously try to overturn positive precedent.
Also the process is slow, tedious and many times expensive. Going back to Townshed v Townshed, it is a case where a will was overturned because a man freed his slaves and his family said that was proof he was mentally unwell to change his will. This, again, is still being cited when overturning wills or when contesting changes late in life. I cannot possibly imagine a more obviously outdated precedent than a judge thinking freeing slaves means you are insane, and yet...
> In Roman judiciary those are usually part of the law as written.
This is increasingly the case as far as UK criminal law is concerned, I think; also to an increasing extent in matters of marriage and children.
But in family law, there isn't much room for talking about precedent, because for many decades Family Court proceedings have been strictly secret. It's now opening up, slowly.
Contract and property law are rooted in custom, i.e. common law; it seems to me that it would be impossible to write down a contract law that didn't have an infinite number of cracks and corner-cases. Do judiciaries that don't have precedent have to re-litigate all those corner-cases from scratch every time?
Not really, that description, and the one provided by the user you responded to is a bit disingenuous. Judges have the option of going against prior rulings all the time, and they do it all the time. But it does usually require some context from the judge for why a different ruling was carried out in this instance, because if they’re basically saying the previous judge’s decision was wrong, that calls into question if that prior case actually found real justice. Additionally, only higher courts (not just small local ones) set precedents for their rulings.
It is legal for Americans to fight for another country, unless it's against the US. In fact the US government said they can't intervene if one is forced to do compulsory military service abroad. It gets complicated fast:
> Fighting for a foreign nation and/or mercenaries is illegal in itself
Nope. It depends on countries (and mood of the year).
Some countries allow to become mercenaries and forbid voluntary fighting for a foreign nation. Some countries allow to voluntary fight for a foreign nation and forbid to become mercenaries. And so on.
Which is... the complete opposite of fighting for a foreign nation since it's part of the French army. You can allow foreigners in your army while at the same time making it illegal for your own citizen to join foreign mercenaries
Because they have not been arrested officially because they returned from a war zone (it’s suspicious but not illegal) but because they used cryptography.
Not in this current context. You can't detain someone willy nilly for 'intentions' without such intentions being explicitly stated as proof in letters, emails, messages, threats etc.
Anti-terrorism and authoritarianism go hand in hand, that's been clear since 9/11.
The problem is that government us terrorism scaremongering to justify erasing citizens rights. It's completely valid to be anti-terrorist and prefer alternative choices to fight it.
For example, in my country, both polices and tribunals are severely under provisioned. I'd start with imroofijg those budgets before passing surveillance laws.
> It's completely valid to be anti-terrorist and prefer alternative choices to fight it.
What alternative choices? France suffered multiple highly deadly attacks on it's soil, including two with 100+ graphic and violent dead. What alternative choices are there to prevent them outside of mass surveillance, infiltrating potentially radicalising religious institutions and shutting them down, arresting members of outwardly radical groups stockpiling weapons and materials for explosives (all things the French government is doing).
I see two comments in and we're already making excuses for authoritarianism. Never have I before seen people go "But mass surveillance, civil right violating arrests are good actually!"
"We gotta auth because there are no alternatives" has been used time and again in history to commit atrocities.
---
Like it or not, People don't just go around committing terrorist attacks everyday. I, for example, and many people I know, have plenty of equipment to do so if I wanted to (multiple firearms, potential explosives etc), but why would I?
How do you stop actual terrorist groups from committing actual terrorist attacks, the like of which france has seen recently, without being "authoritarian"? A terrorist is almost always a normal person. They likely will not have committed a crime until they do the terrorism.
Like, this is paradox of tolerance stuff. How do you prevent bad actors from taking advantage of your permissiveness and liberal laws? I'm not saying france is in the right to detain someone for using a simple app, because they aren't, but that this action is on a spectrum, and everyone from governments to your local forum admin is desperately trying to find the right point on that spectrum. So what do you suggest?
If your answer is "don't try to stop the terrorists", then you should understand that human society really hates random violence that isn't "normal", so unless you have some way to make innocents dying for no reason "normal", people will give up any freedom to fix that. Maslow's hierarchy of needs isn't good science but people's desire for "safety" is a very very strong desire.
there is an inherent social contract w.r.t. freedom and the societal notion of collective liberty -- freedom provides agency to both good and bad actors.
a free society implicitly accepts this as a risk-reward in order to maximize freedom, therefore a social contract.
and the social contract boils down to a government's obligation to secure its citizens (dependent on the boundaries of the implied social contract and what its participants agree to), and whether or not the balance between security and freedom is agreeable for parties involved.
constantly advocating for more security, at all costs, in order to stop "the bad guy", and then presenting a straw man to rhetorically justify it by asking: how else do we stop the bad guys, is authoritarian, anti-freedom, and patronizing.
freedom has an inherent risk of, well, freedom.
law was a construct designed for accountability, not deterrence, nor prevention because its [modern] philosophical (post french revolution) motivation is centered around optimizing for freedom (ie: political liberalism) and recognizing that actors will act -- it just attempts to add the checks and balance idea which attempts to ensure (that is, uphold a social contract), that bad actors are held accountable for their (free) actions.
you'll never be able to magically "legislate" away bad actors, but you can certainly attempt to "control" them, which presents a very, very large slippery slope of positive and negative definitions, and nuances around objective suspicion and other faculties used for discernment w.r.t. bad actors -- all of which directly violate the philosophical (US) notion of innocence until proven guilty, and very much so move away from any kind of scale where freedom is (attempted to be) balanced.
if you want freedom, you can't just erode the social norms built on foundations of trust, agency, and liberty in order to prevent bad actors from acting freely -- what you're calling for is not a free society by definition, because it seeks to mitigate and or prevent agency before it happens (reminds me of Minorty Report), which is restrictive and anti-thetical to freedom.
freedom comes at a price. freedom is (not) slavery, and i have no interest in participating in a social contract that binds me to chains through freedom risk-averse framings of governance.
>You can't detain someone willy nilly for 'intentions'
AIUI that's lawful in the UK, you can detain people under the terrorism act with only suspicion of intent. It does make some sense, it weighs the level of evidence inversely with the potentially large-scale of awful outcomes. (My understanding hear may be flawed/wrong.)
In order for that not to slip into fascism you need a forthright government that is honourable and believes in the rule of law ... both things the current UK government has proven they do not have.
Wasn't there a time when French FidoNet could not exchange zipped mail, because that would be considered encryption? Maybe my memory is inventing things though.
>French minister for the economy and finance, Domenica Strauss-Khan, has said she wishes to liberalise
Dominique Strauss-Kahn (they also butchered his last name) is definitely not a woman (but it's a "mixed" name indeed, that both men and women can have).
Back in those days it was also illegal to share radio frequencies used by the military (since comms were not always encrypted; details about frequency and modulation were secret), and a guy got prosecuted for doing just that.
To clarify this; women in the UK can commit this offence as an accomplice, and anyone can potentially be convicted of the equivalent offence Assault by penetration ie. 'rape' with not a penis objects.
If you detach and consider "the Law" as a standards document it makes more sense to read the two as "old school rape" definition being grandfathered and replaced by the newer Assault by penetration and realising that there's still a whole other spectrum of sexual assault behaviours that can be considered under law that don't involve penetration.
Like mathematics, engineering, and any number of other technical domains, Law is riddled with precise domain definitions of words that don't always align with common non technical understandings and casual usage.
True, but they are very serious and diligent in their actions.
They have been nothing but rational and respectful in everything they have done so far.
You can see it in the writing of the article, it's methodical, logical, and rely strongly on facts through quoting documents.
This have been consistent for years, something I give them a lot of credits for.
Besides, no matter the political orientation of the govt, I think it's safe to say no group at the top was not worth of opposition during the last decades. So it's nice to have movements like La Quadrature that keep them in check.
No, their bias is grotesque. They make it sound like the DGSI bothered monitoring some dudes because they are using uBlock origins, lmfao.
For the US guys here, the equivalent would be the FBI tracking down a few guys back from Afghanistan, monitoring who they talk to, see that they are curious about how to make bombs, how to encrypt your communications, etc, and write an article saying "oh look, the FBI thinkgs that buying sugar at the supermarket is suspicious", because among 1000 other evidence, the FBI at some point noted that "individual bought ingredients to a make a bomb and bought 25kg of sugar".
And now, the parliament is currently discussing a bill about forcing hardware manufacturers to include a remote switch in their products so that the mic and camera could be activated at distance by the authorities, so that the police can listen on potential terrorists[1].
Incredible that they are dumb enough to believe that this can be enforced. We live in the EU, with free movement of goods and people, meaning that we can easily order our next electronic device from any other EU country that will not enforce this nonsense.
Of course, the next step will be you are shopping abroad == you are suspiciously close to being a terrorist.
On the other hand, I can see enough countries willing to support such a requirement, forcing an enforcement on a larger scale.
Moreover, I wonder how they can even force the manufacturers into making a custom solution for their hubris. Unless the idea of adding such a remote switch seduces Xi and now there's a big enough market for this feature to be developed…
It amazes me that the constitution that was put in place then is largely unchanged today, insofar as the French president is still incredibly powerful, parliament is subservient, and the electoral system is deeply majoritarian.
I don't know exactly what it says about a society that it keeps a constitution that was imposed this way, but it isn't anything good. The frank craziness in this article (F-Droid, lol) is in keeping with that.
The president who set up this constitution is the only president who stepped down on his own after losing a vote at the Senate. I think you are a bit weak on the intricacies of the French political system/history, not even mentioning the fact that if you want to play that game, pretty much any political system was never self-generated and was by definition kickstarted by another system previously...
As a French, we tend to change political regimes every so often. Since 1789 we've had five republics, two empires and a couple of other things. I would bet that I'll outlive the fifth republic because of that.
If anything, keeping the same constitution for more than 230 years is a horrifying thought to me.
1. He can call for new elections of the Assembly (not of the Senate) ;
2. He names the Prime Minister and chooses to accept or not the government the Prime Minister then proposes ;
3. He's got minor powers regarding foreign policy.
And that's it.
Now what goes against the President:
a. Regarding [2.] which may seem a major power: the Prime Minister and his government can be kicked out basically at any moment by a vote of the Assembly. So there is no way the President could pick a Prime Minister and a government that doesn't suit the Assembly. Basically, the Assembly has the last word on it, and keeps this power all along the legislature.
b. The government decides and leads the policy (politics?) of the nation (article 20: «Le Gouvernement détermine et conduit la politique de la nation.»): the President is not supposed to have a say about it.
c. Once the President has named the Prime Minister, he cannot remove him. Nor can he remove any other minister. Only the Assembly can do it.
The problem is not the constitution. The problem is that the constitution hasn't got a sacred role as in the USA, and everyone in the various positions of power wipes his ass with it.
So, all what gradually happened more and more in the last few years, is Members of the Parliament voluntarily de facto abdicating their powers to the Government, and members of the Government voluntarily de facto abdicating their powers to the President. In the end they mostly take orders from above and act and vote as they are told to. Just because they enjoy their seat...
552 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadWhy does it seem like the French government is always supporting the worst actors in any conflict? ISIS is (was) so evil and barbaric, they make Putin seem like a great guy. Why would volunteering to fight them ever be seen in a bad light?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_and_the_Rwandan_genocid...
Citation needed of self-defence killings im France being prosecuted passionately and unfairly.
90% of self defense cases end in the tribunal, meaning that the judges saw it as not-self-defense. The biggest factor in all this is proportionality: if you killed someone in self defense but were not yourself having your life threatened, you will go to court.
Running away is a good idea for many reasons, but very few US states or foreign jurisdictions have a duty to retreat as you’re describing here.
https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI0000...
After that remark became massively controversial he attempted to walk his statement back and claim that he just meant that he said he was against the presumption of self defence (which seems to imply he supports a presumption of guilt in self defence cases).
https://www.europe1.fr/politique/oppose-a-la-legitime-defens...
Basically every country in the world that has somewhat stable law and order has a history of prosecuting dubious self defence cases. The requirement for the state to have a monopoly on violence might sound edgy, but it’s not a controversial idea, it’s a requirement for being able to enforce the law. Self defence is an almost universally justifiable reason for a person to violate the monopoly, and it’s not hard to understand why government agencies can end up viewing it as an existential threat, not to the country or its people, but to their own institutions.
For example, this is professor Wael Hallaq of Columbia University describing some defining characteristics of the modern state:
"there are five form-properties possessed by the modern state without which it cannot, at this point in history, be properly conceived. These are:
(1) its constitution as a historical experience that is fairly specific and local;
(2) its sovereignty and the metaphysics to which it has given rise;
(3) its legislative monopoly and the related feature of monopoly over so-called legitimate violence;
(4) its bureaucratic machinery; and
(5) its cultural- hegemonic engagement in the social order, including its production of the national subject"
David Runciman has an excellent explanation of this in the "Talking Politics" podcast which I recommend unreservedly: <https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership>
(Specific segment occurs ~15 minutes in.)
Absent this, one of three conditions exist:
1. There is no monopoly. In which case violence is widespread, and there is no state.
2. There is no legitimacy. In which case violence is capricious.
3. Some non-state power or agent assumes the monopoly on legitimate violence. In which case it becomes, by definition The State.
You might want to consider what a "state" which lacks a monopoly on the legitimate claim to the monopoly on force would look like. To what other entity would it cede that legitimate claim, and/or how would it prevent other entities from enacting capricious violence, as has occurred from time to time in the world, and even now.
The state's claim is to legitimacy. A capricious exercise would be an abrogation of legitimacy
Weber, Max (1978). Roth, Guenther; Wittich, Claus (eds.). Economy and Society. Berkeley: U. California Press. p. 54.
<https://archive.org/details/economysociety00webe/page/54/mod...>
The "monopoly on violence" or "monopoly on force" short-hands are a much more recent emergence, and seem to originate with Murray Rothbard (1960s) and Robert Nozick (1970s), though widespread usage of that phrase really only begins to take off after 1980, per Google's Ngram Viewer: <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=monopoly+on+vi...>
That shorthand has become quite popular, and is often cited by Libertarians as key to their adopting that particular ideology.[1] As expressed by them the formulation is both incorrect and misleading.
________________________________
Notes:
1. E.g., Penn Jillette, <https://www.newsweek.com/penn-jillette-how-became-libertaria...> and Charles Koch <https://www.newsweek.com/penn-jillette-how-became-libertaria...>.
But fighting on the Russian side is illegal and is punishable by long prison terms even if you didn't commit any war crimes there.
That applies to all residents of the country - including Russian citizens.
> And what exactly has France done to fight ISIS anyway?
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_internationale_en_Ir... (curiously the English language article doesn't mention French forces in the outline, but does in the text)
Just sent an aircraft carrier, some ships and planes, and special forces. And intelligence. Contributed more than anyone outside of the US and local forces like YPG. Led one of the first coalitions that were extremely wide (including everyone from Bahrain through Belgium and Japan to Russia and China). But sure, you haven't heard about it, so they didn't do anything
> I guess that's a little better than what they did in Rwanda to support the genocide there
Wait, is France bad when it intervenes or when it doesn't intervene? In Rwanda they didn't "support" the genocide of course, just didn't do much to stop it after supporting the faction that commited it before.
That is why they were put under surveillance when they came back to France.
Here is a reference in French: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_du_8_d%C3%A9cembre_202...
Ultimately it's a bit more complicated than good people fighting versus evil people (and as far as I'm concerned, they were effectively fighting for a US proxy against another US proxy).
The Taliban are fighting ISIS... do you consider the Taliban to be radical ?
Some people in the thread should open a book or two, we're not in "bad guys vs good guys" world
In part, because the YPG is seen by the french state as a terrorist group, for various political reasons, and also because having leftists trained in handling weapons is seemingly more terrifying to the government than having neonazis trained in handling weapons. Make of that what you will.
To appease the Turks I assume?
They have not been any evidence of criminal activities by those people. So far, all what they have against them is "they are protective about their privacy".
That's a terrible reason to arrest and maintain people in jail.
A crime is not something you evaluate morally. It has a very narrow definition that is codified by each society it is been judged in.
Nine EU countries made similar rules, though I don't know how many still have it in effect. Any citizen/resident of Denmark is still prohibited from going to the conflict zones of Syria and Iraq.
I am not familiar with French law. Is that literally a crime or are you saying it as an expression?
A cynical person would say it's because corrupt leaders are afraid of potential consequences for their actions. But there's likely other, more mundane reasons too. :)
Now, depending on who you ask, the PYD/YPG is "good, because they fight ISIS" (e.g. the official stance of the US) or "Terrorists, because they are basically just extensions of the PKK" (what Turkey says).
This leads to a lot of inconsistency in foreign policy within NATO. For example Sweden is pressured to crack down on PYD/YPG to be admitted into NATO. The US, like many others, have supported the YPG/PYD in the fight against ISIS. So I imagine Turkey is also pressuring other NATO countries like France in this case, to go after PKK collaborators including the adjacent syrian orgs.
So basically: why are the people volunteering to fight ISIS seen as terrorists within NATO? I'd guess these days to a large extent because Turkey says so.
Fighting for a foreign nation or mercenaries is illegal, no matter if you're fighting the "bad guys"
Like joining the Taliban ?
https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2023/06/05/criminalization-o...
These people have been sent to prison because they are suspicious, not because of an action they have done (something made possible as a special case of an older antiterrorism law). And, amongst other things, using Signal and Linux with the encryption-on settings are explicitly listed as some of the things making them suspicious in the eyes of the law.
That is a slippery slope.
The issue here is that they seemed to have used the encrypted communications to proof criminal behavior.
No one deserves to be subject to my raw, unrefined thoughts. It's hell enough for me
The real, actual problem is the unlawful detention.
> And, amongst other things, using Signal and Linux with the encryption-on settings are explicitly listed as some of the things making them suspicious in the eyes of the law.
In combination with other things, and in this article there are quotes from interrogations which explicitly ask "have you organised illegal activities through encrypted chat communications".
how is this defined?
If I did, why in hells name would I tell you?
Why would you ask that in the first place? To catch out the incredibly dumb terrorists?
The mean could be a 5$ wrench, hacking into your devices or plain old surveillance
There's absolutely nothing you gain by making it easy for them by telling them that you did.
They are basically saying "if you close the door of the toilets when you poop, you are suspicious".
I don't think fighting for your civil rights is a 'very subjective view.'
If you don't think people should have their civil rights, the questionable position isn't the activists'.
If the people were advocating for a state-incorporated everything ala Soviet style communism, I'd agree with you. They aren't.
You want democracy? Good. You want to limit corporations to make sure small businesses stand a fair chance? Ok. You want to touch personal property, cancel opponents or abolish borders/police/military/etc? Russian boat that way.
Ah yes, Soviet Russia, known for... Uh... Not having borders, police, or military.
Come on man. Not all far left ideologies are authoritarian, there's a whole authoritarian-libertarian axis. Many far leftists hate authoritarians, including left wing authoritarians like state socialists, as much as you do.
So far I've met two types of far-left. Flat-out authoritarians. Or „non-authoritarians“ who stay silent on implementation of their ideas. Probably because their ideas can be implemented (and, more importantly, kept in place) either authoritarian methods. Or full support in society, which is unrealistic.
No, no, we're already down the slope and going fast, we are now at "dissolve informal ecologist organizations and raid their homes and families with antiterrorist groups and gear for the crimes of blocking some construction", "get friendly with neonazi groups and let them parade in Paris, let them attack prides and leftist bars".
So there was no neonazi group parading, but there was a neonazi group parading.
> Comparatively, the far left is arrested for actual violent actions.
There was none in this case. On the other hand, the far right is responsible for several assault in Bordeaux and Lyon, was prosecuted in Nantes for beating up nearly to death two far left teenager, murdered Féderico Martin Aramburu, burned the house of the Saint Brévin mayor, attacked and firebombed a LGBT center in Tour, ...
Is there a place where we can read more about this? The article seems to explain none of that context, it only purports that people are suspicious and can be arrested for simply having good 'digital hygiene'.
Edit: Some relevant passages from TFA
> Likewise, the critical attitude towards technologies, and in particular to Big Tech (Google, Amazon, Facebook Apple and Microsoft, GAFAM), is considered as a sign of radicalisation. Among the questions asked to the defendants, one can read: Are you anti-GAFA?”, “What do you think of GAFA?” or “Do you feel a certain reserve towards communication technologies?”.
> These questions are to be read in light of one report from the DGSI titled “The ultra-left movement”, which states that “members” of this movement are alledgedly showing “a great culture of secrecy […] and a certain reserve towards technology”.
Don't see any mention of Syria or weapons.
So caring about one's human right to privacy is a "culture of secrecy" now
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Defense_Units
It was/is a weird situation. They are very anticapitalist and marxist with some anarchist elements, but they got western support when they were fighting ISIS (and to some extent Assad/Putin) in Syria.
So in Syria communist rebells got US weapons and I believe US troops are still on the ground helping them. But back home in the west, those activists get prosecuted, because the PKK (the mother organisation of YPG) is considered a terrorist organisation (and likely they still are doing terrorism, even though it is of course a "separate" organisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdistan_Freedom_Hawks)
Like more than half of HackerNews :/
[0]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_du_8_d%C3%A9cembre_202... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_December_2020_incident
[0]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_du_8_d%C3%A9cembre_202...
However, it does make the point that it is akin to "L'affaire de Tarnac" that lasted from 2008 to 2018.
When accused of authoritarian tendencies the government usually answers "go to China or North Korea to see what a dictatorship is like".
[0] https://twitter.com/mart1oeil/status/1671467485931921408
China and North Korea exist on completely separate spectrums.
Pretty much relying on the assumption that investigators will find stationary phones suspicious when they spy on you
Could put them in those charging lockboxes seen as airports and festivals, the infrastructure is already there
Guess I’ll market it to climate activists in europe lol
edit: maybe those delivery robots are even better couriers, since it fits the idea of getting a courier to come back to you better than an uber on the other side of town. risky but the fun kind.
You need wider range, more chaos, but mainly consistent spoofed behaviour.
Ah yes, the current political Trojan horse.
There is nothing Macron that is left leaning, relative to France politic spectrum.
>> Interesting. Right-leaning governement (if not "far-right" according to some), but has no control over illegal migrants routinely roaming around committing crimes. I thought a key marker of "the right" was being (too) strict on order and ruthless implementation of the law.
Sarkozy, his most alike predecessor, used to wear a t-shirt that said "NYPD" while jogging, as he was president of France; and later renamed his party "Les Républicains" as an hommage to US Republicans (!!?!)
This was 9 years ago, so right before Trump happened. At the time, 53% of party members thought it was "too American" but they accepted the change nonetheless.
Macron pushes through "liberal" reforms (liberal in Europe means the opposite as in the US: liberals here are free-market proponents) because he thinks it will make France great again, I guess.
In France, we almost only hear about other countries politics when there is a chance for a far right party to gain something. As far as all other domains are concerned, we may from time to time get a funny/shocking miscellaneous news item, and that's it.
Also, images/stereotypes about a country last a long time, long after they have stopped being true.
Ironically, perhaps the only emitting country that differs a bit is... the USA, for probably most countries over the planet are flooded with information and contemporary culture from the USA.
For example, to get back a bit to the original subject, people may know the American police and justice system better than their own. Like, French people when they are arrested would believe that they have enforceable rights and that rigorous processes are respected. Ah!
Once, in custody, I even had the impudence of requesting a lawyer as I was allowed to. LOL, no way. And it is not simply a problem of a rotten police: the prosecutor, the judges, they are all covering this up, it is the whole police+justice system which 'works' like this.
Many current problems stem from the fact that post-war mechanisms written into the governmental system are abused by the president and elected leaders. E.g. presidential overruling of parlamental votes.
to be fair, the emperor climbed on the throne pretty much on his own; I think he had support across broad parts of the population, but it's not as if he was elected (and he didn't even start as an emperor, that came a few years after his coup)
> I did not steal the crown. I found it lying in the gutter, and I picked it up with the sword. But it was the people who placed it on my head.
The man was massively popular with the populace [1] [2] and he got elected emperor with a referendum [3] to which 7 million people were called. By modern standard that barely qualifies, but for an emperor in 1804 ...
A common misconception was that the revolution was to remove the all powerful head of state. It wasn't, the people just wanted a competent one and improved living conditions.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/277eu3/why_i...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gli6nn/consi...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_French_constitutional_ref...
The French Revolution paved the way for just about every pro-worker reform in the modern world.
First, this is not "well-educated French acquaintences" so much as it is supporters of Melanchon's LFI political party, who explicitely campaign on the idea of ending the 5th republic to start a 6th where all problem would be magically solved.
Second, the reason I hate his proposal, is because he explicitely refuses to give any specific detail on what the 6th republic would be. He claims it would be "decided by the public" but there is no reason why a pre work couldn't be done BEFORE. In effect, he pretends to be saying "we will end the 5th for a better 6th", but what he's actually saying is "let's end the one we have now instead of fixing it, and replace it with something I will have the power to decide, you must accept to throw it away without knowing what you will get in exchange or how it will be made but trust me it will totally be better and I will totally let the people decide".
Our 5th republic might be flawed, but I'm not putting it in the trash without any idea of what we will get in return, that's brexit referendum level of flawed.
And I will always be weary of someone who claims to have a simple solution to a complex problem, on the condition that I give him power over me, especially if another condition is that I cannot know what said solution is before making my decision.
Third,
> the 6th in its history
Would be the 6th republic sure, but absolutely not the 6th "system of government", it would be like our 25th or something ?
You're absolutely right that there are definitely some people who want a 6th republic but do not vote or agree with LFI, but for the sake of generalized conversation like we're having now they're mostly irrelevant. If it were to happen, it would be through him and his "vision", and as such I maintain my critics.
Beware of what you want for you might just get it.
I am probably not the only one.
Just believe that the country is "ripe for it" because of repeated abuses of the, exceptionally large for a western democracy, presidential powers.
But people have been dissatisfied with that ever since the last constitution was enacted. Including, famously, Mitterrand, who despite his many earlier criticisms (describing the 5th republic as "Le Coup d’État Permanent" [1], which could be translated to "The Continuous Coup") was prompt to fully enjoy those powers once elected himself.
So it’s quite old.
[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Coup_d%27%C3%89tat_permanen...
It was one of the most important and most protested reform of the last decades and the president / government used every constitutional breach they could to avoid any vote from people's representatives.
Charles de Courson, who tried to force the vote by proposing an abrogation of the law to the parliament is not really a leftist, he was even going to vote himself in favor of the reform.
We, the French, elected a parliament where Macron didn’t have the absolute majority and Macron tries everything he can to avoid the parliament when he know he will not have enough votes. It’s a democracy crisis wether you are from the left or from the right because Macron is interpreting the constitution like he can dismissal the parliament when he wants although most French didn’t vote for his party.
It was ripe to burn since 1958.
It should be noted that some of the main people who called to view it as a coup were people from other parts of the political spectrum who had other ideas of how it should happen and who should end up in power, including Mitterand (who ended up president of the 5th in 1986). These people however were also for the end of the 4th.
It includes titles like L'Agonie de la IVème République (Agony of the Fourth Republic), La fièvre hexagonale : les grandes crises politiques de 1871 à 1968 (Hexagon Fever: Major Political Crises from 1871 to 1968) and a pretty good biography of de Gaulle. It's from that book that I learned of all the craziness of 1958, the one that involved general Salan (who would be sentenced to death a few years after that for trying a coup against de Gaulle) and all.
[1] https://www.amazon.fr/Gouverner-France-Michel-Winock/dp/2072...
Couldn't find any source online except for this comment. Might be because of tranalation though.
I assume they were alluding to the fact that the current French state is called the “Fifth Republic” but there were various non-Republic regimes as well so it would actually be more than the 6th “system of government”.
And given the sort of stuff they brought to their protests: swords, machettes, baseball bats, jerrycan, bricks, fireworks, petanque balls, Molotov cocktails, fire bombs, etc, it is particularly disingenuous to pretend they have been dissolved for not talking to the police when arrested.
You can read the actual decret in French: https://twitter.com/GDarmanin/status/1671450289298198528
While I won't argue with the fact that these are indeed formidable missiles, it does make for a unique French touch.
The total value of items destroyed has been estimated to be about 8 million by the French state. While not a small number, I haven't seen the antiterrorist police be sent to the FNSEA's headquarters for their history of violence and destruction ever since 1960. It is part of their methods ever since their inception, but greasing some palms high up in the government certainly helps.
>And given the sort of stuff they brought to their protests: swords, machettes, baseball bats, jerrycan, bricks, fireworks, petanque balls, Molotov cocktails, fire bombs, etc, it is particularly disingenuous to pretend they have been dissolved for not talking to the police when arrested.
Violence. Is. Caused. By. The. Police. None of these, not a single one of these items were used until the police started indiscriminately tear gassing thousands of protesters, the vast majority of them peaceful. Five thousand grenades and weapons classified as war weapons used on protesters. Half of the items you mention were taken by the police with roadblocks more than twenty kilometers away. Sorry for driving with petanque balls in my trunk, I guess.
>You can read the actual decret in French: https://twitter.com/GDarmanin/status/1671450289298198528
Sure, let's read the sexual abuser, the national-socialist-journal-writing sack of shit's declaration. One part in particular is very interesting:
Considérant d'autre part que le groupement SLT diffuse a ses membres et sympathisants, via ses réseaux sociaux, des modes opératoires directement inspirés de ceux des <<Black Blocks>>; que parmi ces préconisations figurent le port de tenues interdisant leur identification par les forces de l'ordre, en contradiction avec les habitudes des militants écologistes de manifester a visage découvert, le fair de laisser son téléphone mobile allumé a son domicile ou de le mettre en <<mode avtion>> en arrivant sur les lieux de la manifestation pour éviter le bornage, le fait de ne pas communiquer les codes dévérrouillage de l'appareil ou de ne pas répondre aux forces de l'ordre en cas d'interpellation; qu'y figurent également des consignes d'ordre médical <<en cas de nécessité d'hospitalisation, dans la mesure du possible, se rendre dans un hôpital éloigné de l'action, rester flou, ne pas donner son identité, prévoir de l'argent liquide>>; que par ailleurs est préconisé le port du masque FFP3; de lunettes de protection contre les gaz; ...
For the HNers that to not have the privilege to read the beautiful language of the country of Human Rights, where protesters get arbitrarily arrested in the hospital and in their homes, this is a translation of how they justify being a single step below "declaring ecologist protestors an actual terrorist group":
Considering that the SLT group spreads to its members and sympathizers through social networks, operative modes directly inspired from those of <<Black Blocks>>; that amongst those suggestions include wearing outfits preventing their identification by the police forces; in contradiction with the habit of protesting with their face out usually had by ecologist protestors; the fact of leaving their mobile phones turned on in their homes or to put them in airplane mode when arriving at the protest to avoid triangulation; to refuse to communicate their passwords or to refuse to respond to the police when being arrested; that also contains medical related orders: <<in case of hospitalization, as much as possible, go to a hospital far away from the action, stay quiet, do not give your identity, have some cash>>; that wearing FFP3 masks and gas protection glasses is recommended...
Want to add some more ? Sure. They arrested an EELV member that was not present at any of the protests. Why ?...
It's obvious violence must have existed from both side. It's a bit obvious you're from the far left, just be neutral.
It's completely unacceptable for any police force to use "crowd control" devices that are explicitly disallowed in warfare under the Geneva Accords. Full stop.
But you cannot blame them for the violence in the protest they co-organized. People are free to attend the protest, and they cannot control them. They never called for violence against police. And most protest now in France have some people fighting with the police.
The same way you can see firefighters throwing stuff (including petanque ball) to police during firefighers protest. But you cannot blame the firefigheter union for this.
Just wondering if your reasoning is based on logic or political sides.
But for sure I do blame Neo-Nazi for being Neo-Nazi !
Taking that into account, one could have reasons to believe cops wouldn’t be as tough on protesting fascists, and that protesting fascists wouldn’t be as violent towards cops.
Though I’d be curious to see wether or not facts support this hunch.
No better than the gang laws we have here in the US. It seems Jefferson's rule about 200 years or so between revolutions was right after all.
And if they put their label on it it's their responsibility.
This seems objectively reductive and represents ideological beliefs as objective facts.
Maybe the masses are upset and this is a sign of things to come, that should be listened to.
> This seems objectively reductive and represents ideological beliefs as objective facts.
No, you just didn't liked that thing you like got attacked for the thing they did and are making up excuses.
Technically, it "is on" whoever objectively plays a role in the underlying causality.
You "may" be referring to your perception of what is going on, as opposed to what is actually going on (which is unreachable).
>> This seems objectively reductive and represents ideological beliefs as objective facts.
> No, you just didn't liked that thing you like got attacked for the thing they did and are making up excuses.
Except I have the ability to describe the various ways in which it is (at least plausibly) objectively reductive and represents ideological beliefs as objective facts, whereas you have a much harder problem: proving that you can actually read my mind (or, are omniscient).
Yeah, they "accidentally" carried swords, firebombs and molotov cocktails to a protest. It was an honest mistake, right? I mean, those are normal things people carry around on a daily basis, aren't they?
Oh, come on, as if that were a thing so common that there had been a specific word for it for nearly 200 years.
Protesting for the survival of the planet we're all living on is not a crime it's a necessity to not go extinct.
Do you know how many problems in America regarding human rights stem from qualified immunity? Don't let that BS keep spreading.
you mean as opposed to the people who went to Gitmo for wearing casio F-91W watchs back in the early 2000s[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F-91W
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seton_Hall_reports#Detainees...
It's par for the course in a country that bans paternity testing (to "protect the 'unity' of families"! ) [0]
[0] https://idtodna.com/paternity-test-in-france/
I guess they lost that ability now, and are trying to criminalize private communication.
"knifes can be used to stab people, let's ban them altogether"
"cleaning supplies can be used to poison people, let's ban them altogether"
#logik
also, potential = guilty until proven innocent
The Home Office is looking for ways to reduce knife crime. We suggest that banning the sale of long pointed knives is a sensible and practical measure that would have this effect.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC558080/
Maybe this is like a logic bomb but for authoritarians. Try to convince Macron or random police officers that they too are _potential_ terrorists and watch them go cross eyed.
He had no phone...
The real problem is the unlawful detention of one of the men, for which a court finally intervened and he has been freed under surveillance.
Since it seems they don't have anything, they are criminalizing normal tools and dev tools because your average reader/citizen doesn't know the difference between a hacker and a cracker, let alone the right of privacy vs conspiring. The only nice thing IMHO is that everyone uses Whatsapp and no one considers it "criminal", so by bundling Signal etc together with Whatsapp they are making themselves look like they are exaggerating for the average person.
No, it does not. While this group is indeed suspicious, detaining them without a proof (and using whatsapp as your proof) opens a serious precedent. Now anyone can be detain for that. And it'll be used for serious suspicious cases later but also will be used against someone like you because someone in the police didn't like how you walk.
Of note for US readers, France legal system is not a jurisprudential system as in the US. That is, a judge's ruling does not become law - i.e must be followed as law by another judge -, only parliament can make law.
The only instance having a form of jurisprudence power is Cour de Cassation, but that's only indirect: being the ultimate instance of recourse CCass rulings for similar cases have high chances of having similar outcomes. They may (or may not) influence other court rulings but a) they are not law and b) reaching to CCass is not guaranteed, so other courts judges are completely free to rule differently (as long as they abide by law)
That said, holistically these precedents matter as they may give broad strokes on mindset trends from the powers at play.
E.g. if the law says "murder carries a penalty of minimum 5 years and maximum 30 years imprisonment", then a judge cannot give a sentence of 4 year or of 40 years, even if they personally believe this to be a "better" sentence.
Taking your example, what constitutes murder and minimum and maximum penalty are defined in "broad strokes", and the judge gets to define "in this specific case that person is guilty in a way where they should be sentenced to X years", and that becomes law (IIUC scoped to their jurisdiction), progressively refining and tuning the whole system, because the next judge faced with a similar enough case would be bound by it. The lawyer game is then to argue whether the current case is close enough to a previous one for the previous ruling to match (and thus tying the judge's hands). A thoughtful US judge would consider both the case at hand and the implications of being law-generating when issuing a ruling.
Which really makes me wonder, how the hell to even professionals keep track of that? For regular stuff you literally can have thousands of relevant cases going back centuries as "precedent" to build on.
The largest jurisdiction like the Federal judiciary, for example, have the Federal Sentencing Guidelines which have a strict point system for criminal sentencing where judges have little discretion due to a Federal “tough on crime” wave.
It really depends on the subfield of law and the vagueness of past legislation.
The law is the law, if it's unfair it gets changed.
Having the judge "making it up" as he goes, and then another judge using that sentence 120 years later as precedent like in american courts sounds insane
Citing Slavery Project did an analysis and found 18% of all current cases in courts either quote slavery rulings or are less than 2 steps removed (quote a ruling that quotes the slavery ruling).
> The law is the law, if it's unfair it gets changed.
That's the part that doesn't match reality.
I mean Spain recently had a big case related to a group sexual assault. Society was up in arms about the ruling (minimum sentence was 1 year, max was like 6)
So the law was amended and now sexual violence has a maximum sentence of 15 years which is more in line with other european countries.
"Precedent" is a way of saving the time of courts and lawyers, by not having to argue the same details every time they come up. And it's not as if every court judgement becomes a precedent; only higher courts can set precedents, and they can only be overturned by higher courts still.
I think this is a reasonable way of approaching justice.
And on top of that you have a window for sentencing. So if murder is lets say 4-20 years in jail. And you were drunk, that makes it worse, but it was not premeditated, and this and that it all adds up and you might 6 years or you might get 18 depending on the circumstances.
This also allows the law to be rewritten from scratch instead of being based on whatever higher court thought in the 1800s.
You do; but that's not actually what I was thinking about. That's just about sentencing, and here (the UK) sentencing doesn't fall within the purview of precedent; there are sentencing guidelines set by senior members of the judiciary.
I was thinking of actual points of law, such as what constitutes unreasonable behaviour, or whether possession of some quantity X of illegal drugs is conclusive evidence of intent to supply.
> whatever higher court thought in the 1800s
It's open to higher courts to overturn precedents, if they've become outdated to the extent they no longer make sense. The very old precedents are presumably precedents that make so much sense that nobody has successfully challenged them. If someone runs into an adverse judgement based on an ancient precedent that is unsupportable, no doubt there's some barrister that would like to make their case (and their reputation) at appeal, by overturning it.
In Roman judiciary those are usually part of the law as written. So instead of having a law about "unresonable behaviour", you have a law explicitely stating that "making noise above X db at night is illegal" or "drinking in the street is illegal" etc. So the idea of what constitutes intent to supply is based on quantity, anything below X grams is personal use etc.
And you can always add aggravating circumstances that "promote" a crime, so you can have such thing as intent to supply counts having drugs and X amount of money on you, or X amount of drugs and leaflets saying you sell etc. In other words you can explicitely state the kind of things judiciary precedent would probably take into account ahead of time.
> The very old precedents are presumably precedents that make so much sense that nobody has successfully challenged them.
Or the higher courts have not taken a case that challanges them. I am not sure about the UK but in the US, the supreme court pretty much picks their cases which means they can arguably allow for dangerous precedent to stay as long as needed by avoiding cases they know would present a resonable chance of overturning. Or equally dangerous oversee cases that maliciously try to overturn positive precedent.
Also the process is slow, tedious and many times expensive. Going back to Townshed v Townshed, it is a case where a will was overturned because a man freed his slaves and his family said that was proof he was mentally unwell to change his will. This, again, is still being cited when overturning wills or when contesting changes late in life. I cannot possibly imagine a more obviously outdated precedent than a judge thinking freeing slaves means you are insane, and yet...
This is increasingly the case as far as UK criminal law is concerned, I think; also to an increasing extent in matters of marriage and children.
But in family law, there isn't much room for talking about precedent, because for many decades Family Court proceedings have been strictly secret. It's now opening up, slowly.
Contract and property law are rooted in custom, i.e. common law; it seems to me that it would be impossible to write down a contract law that didn't have an infinite number of cracks and corner-cases. Do judiciaries that don't have precedent have to re-litigate all those corner-cases from scratch every time?
It is legal for Americans to fight for another country, unless it's against the US. In fact the US government said they can't intervene if one is forced to do compulsory military service abroad. It gets complicated fast:
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/travel-lega...
Nope. It depends on countries (and mood of the year).
Some countries allow to become mercenaries and forbid voluntary fighting for a foreign nation. Some countries allow to voluntary fight for a foreign nation and forbid to become mercenaries. And so on.
France even has the French Foreign Legion...
Which is... the complete opposite of fighting for a foreign nation since it's part of the French army. You can allow foreigners in your army while at the same time making it illegal for your own citizen to join foreign mercenaries
Not in this current context. You can't detain someone willy nilly for 'intentions' without such intentions being explicitly stated as proof in letters, emails, messages, threats etc.
This is authoritarian pandering 101.
No, this is matter-of-fact anti-terrorism.
The problem is that government us terrorism scaremongering to justify erasing citizens rights. It's completely valid to be anti-terrorist and prefer alternative choices to fight it.
For example, in my country, both polices and tribunals are severely under provisioned. I'd start with imroofijg those budgets before passing surveillance laws.
What alternative choices? France suffered multiple highly deadly attacks on it's soil, including two with 100+ graphic and violent dead. What alternative choices are there to prevent them outside of mass surveillance, infiltrating potentially radicalising religious institutions and shutting them down, arresting members of outwardly radical groups stockpiling weapons and materials for explosives (all things the French government is doing).
"We gotta auth because there are no alternatives" has been used time and again in history to commit atrocities.
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Like it or not, People don't just go around committing terrorist attacks everyday. I, for example, and many people I know, have plenty of equipment to do so if I wanted to (multiple firearms, potential explosives etc), but why would I?
Like, this is paradox of tolerance stuff. How do you prevent bad actors from taking advantage of your permissiveness and liberal laws? I'm not saying france is in the right to detain someone for using a simple app, because they aren't, but that this action is on a spectrum, and everyone from governments to your local forum admin is desperately trying to find the right point on that spectrum. So what do you suggest?
If your answer is "don't try to stop the terrorists", then you should understand that human society really hates random violence that isn't "normal", so unless you have some way to make innocents dying for no reason "normal", people will give up any freedom to fix that. Maslow's hierarchy of needs isn't good science but people's desire for "safety" is a very very strong desire.
a free society implicitly accepts this as a risk-reward in order to maximize freedom, therefore a social contract.
and the social contract boils down to a government's obligation to secure its citizens (dependent on the boundaries of the implied social contract and what its participants agree to), and whether or not the balance between security and freedom is agreeable for parties involved.
constantly advocating for more security, at all costs, in order to stop "the bad guy", and then presenting a straw man to rhetorically justify it by asking: how else do we stop the bad guys, is authoritarian, anti-freedom, and patronizing.
freedom has an inherent risk of, well, freedom.
law was a construct designed for accountability, not deterrence, nor prevention because its [modern] philosophical (post french revolution) motivation is centered around optimizing for freedom (ie: political liberalism) and recognizing that actors will act -- it just attempts to add the checks and balance idea which attempts to ensure (that is, uphold a social contract), that bad actors are held accountable for their (free) actions.
you'll never be able to magically "legislate" away bad actors, but you can certainly attempt to "control" them, which presents a very, very large slippery slope of positive and negative definitions, and nuances around objective suspicion and other faculties used for discernment w.r.t. bad actors -- all of which directly violate the philosophical (US) notion of innocence until proven guilty, and very much so move away from any kind of scale where freedom is (attempted to be) balanced.
if you want freedom, you can't just erode the social norms built on foundations of trust, agency, and liberty in order to prevent bad actors from acting freely -- what you're calling for is not a free society by definition, because it seeks to mitigate and or prevent agency before it happens (reminds me of Minorty Report), which is restrictive and anti-thetical to freedom.
freedom comes at a price. freedom is (not) slavery, and i have no interest in participating in a social contract that binds me to chains through freedom risk-averse framings of governance.
AIUI that's lawful in the UK, you can detain people under the terrorism act with only suspicion of intent. It does make some sense, it weighs the level of evidence inversely with the potentially large-scale of awful outcomes. (My understanding hear may be flawed/wrong.)
In order for that not to slip into fascism you need a forthright government that is honourable and believes in the rule of law ... both things the current UK government has proven they do not have.
One of many problems with western societies at the moment is the idea that we can be free while under surveillance.
Given the weakness of the elements assembled, why would the DGSI decide to withhold any decisive proof from the eyes of the justice system?
>French minister for the economy and finance, Domenica Strauss-Khan, has said she wishes to liberalise
Dominique Strauss-Kahn (they also butchered his last name) is definitely not a woman (but it's a "mixed" name indeed, that both men and women can have).
Back in those days it was also illegal to share radio frequencies used by the military (since comms were not always encrypted; details about frequency and modulation were secret), and a guy got prosecuted for doing just that.
What about HTTPS? Suspicious.
You have a small opinel knife at the bottom of your backpack to cut your saucisson and the police is in a bad mood? Straight to jail.
https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/rape-and-sexual-offenc...
Like mathematics, engineering, and any number of other technical domains, Law is riddled with precise domain definitions of words that don't always align with common non technical understandings and casual usage.
They have been nothing but rational and respectful in everything they have done so far.
You can see it in the writing of the article, it's methodical, logical, and rely strongly on facts through quoting documents.
This have been consistent for years, something I give them a lot of credits for.
Besides, no matter the political orientation of the govt, I think it's safe to say no group at the top was not worth of opposition during the last decades. So it's nice to have movements like La Quadrature that keep them in check.
For the US guys here, the equivalent would be the FBI tracking down a few guys back from Afghanistan, monitoring who they talk to, see that they are curious about how to make bombs, how to encrypt your communications, etc, and write an article saying "oh look, the FBI thinkgs that buying sugar at the supermarket is suspicious", because among 1000 other evidence, the FBI at some point noted that "individual bought ingredients to a make a bomb and bought 25kg of sugar".
But they didn't.
That's the red flag.
This is fine…
[1]: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/societe/justice/le-senat-donne-s...
Of course, the next step will be you are shopping abroad == you are suspiciously close to being a terrorist.
On the other hand, I can see enough countries willing to support such a requirement, forcing an enforcement on a larger scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1958_crisis_in_France
It amazes me that the constitution that was put in place then is largely unchanged today, insofar as the French president is still incredibly powerful, parliament is subservient, and the electoral system is deeply majoritarian.
I don't know exactly what it says about a society that it keeps a constitution that was imposed this way, but it isn't anything good. The frank craziness in this article (F-Droid, lol) is in keeping with that.
If anything, keeping the same constitution for more than 230 years is a horrifying thought to me.
1. He can call for new elections of the Assembly (not of the Senate) ;
2. He names the Prime Minister and chooses to accept or not the government the Prime Minister then proposes ;
3. He's got minor powers regarding foreign policy.
And that's it.
Now what goes against the President:
a. Regarding [2.] which may seem a major power: the Prime Minister and his government can be kicked out basically at any moment by a vote of the Assembly. So there is no way the President could pick a Prime Minister and a government that doesn't suit the Assembly. Basically, the Assembly has the last word on it, and keeps this power all along the legislature.
b. The government decides and leads the policy (politics?) of the nation (article 20: «Le Gouvernement détermine et conduit la politique de la nation.»): the President is not supposed to have a say about it.
c. Once the President has named the Prime Minister, he cannot remove him. Nor can he remove any other minister. Only the Assembly can do it.
The problem is not the constitution. The problem is that the constitution hasn't got a sacred role as in the USA, and everyone in the various positions of power wipes his ass with it.
So, all what gradually happened more and more in the last few years, is Members of the Parliament voluntarily de facto abdicating their powers to the Government, and members of the Government voluntarily de facto abdicating their powers to the President. In the end they mostly take orders from above and act and vote as they are told to. Just because they enjoy their seat...