Take the invasion of privacy case heard last week against the butler who recorded hours of conversations held in the personal office of ageing billionaire and L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt and five journalists (three from Mediapart and two from weekly news magazine Le Point) who were involved in publishing their contents. At the time of the revelations, a lively debate opposed those who believed it to be useful and necessary to make the conversations public and those who, for moral or legal reasons, held that their public exposure was a violation of personal privacy.
Since then, the justice system has decided on the matter. During the first of the trials in the Bettencourt affair, not only were the recordings of the conversations declared to be authentic, but they were used as key evidence in the prosecution case. Severe sentences were handed down to Bettencourt’s wealth and investment manager, to his successor, to partially senile Bettencourt’s ‘friend’ to who she handed hundreds of millions of euros in gifts, the photographer François-Marie Banier, and to his companion, to the manager of the billionaire’s Indian Ocean island D’Arros, to two of her solicitors, and to a businessman close to former French president Nicolas Sarkozy. The oddity of the sentences was that the politicians whose names figured in the case were, finally, the only ones to have been found innocent of wrongdoing in this tentacular affair;
But that did not prevent, just five months later, the decision to prosecute the journalists and media who made both the public and the justice system aware of the manipulation of the old lady. At their trial last week in Bordeaux, the prosecutor demanded the court magistrates to deliver symbolic sentences against the journalists, namely fines which she said should not be less than 1,500 euros each. In a manner of speaking, this singular trial was that of the roof which attacks the pillars that supported it.
Last week’s second ‘affair’ was that which struck Mediapart, the website Arrêt sur images and those of Indigo publications. Let’s not go into detail here about the controversial tax adjustment demanded of the sites (see more on that here), nor the public mobilization in support of us (for which we give our thanks), but rather let’s consider the stupefying chronology of the events. In February 2014, the French parliament finally ended the protracted argument between the online press and the State over the punitive VAT rate that was applied to it rather than the favourable rate (ten times lower) applied to the print-based press. So it was that French Members of Parliament voted through a change in the law which now stipulates that the online press is subject to the same reduced VAT rate as the print-based press.
But was that tardy change to the law last year the end of the matter? Not a bit! By ordering Mediapart and fellow online press organizations to make backpayments in a tax adjustment concerning the pre-February 2014 period, the tax administration is retroactively applying fiscal legislation that no longer exists, and which was drawn up before the advent of the online press. It is as if the tax authorities are calling on the electric train to pay for steam power, the car for the horse, or the printer for carbon paper.
Where does Omar Raddad (see more on his case here) come into all of this? What lies in common between the gardener accused of murdering his employer and the issues relating to the media? Well, it’s quite simple: it reveals how out of phase the naval-gazing institutions are with life that advances. The announcement last Thursday that DNA comparisons may now be carried out following the discovery some while ago of new DNA prints on key evidence in the case causes retrospective head-spinning. Here you have a man, guilty or innocent, who cries out, 20 years after he was sentenced and 19 years after he was pardoned, that his case be re-examined. If he is innocent, the delay in reaching the proof of this is chilling, and if he is guilty his demand is crazy because he will be unmasked. Why weren’t the facts of the case re-examined before now in the light of the new evidence? Why is there this stubborn refusal to not use the advances of science, while there is still time, as quickly as possible?
The reasons for these incongruities are multiple and diverse. In the Bettencourt affair, there were numerous examples of the application of political pressure, while in the case of the tax issue they certainly do not appear to be absent. Concerning the case of Omar Raddad, they haunt the background. If the powers that be - whether they are political, judicial, economic or administrative - often cut themselves off from reality, it is in order to protect themselves, and sometimes to the point of absurdity. If they have their foot on the brakes, it’s because they want to keep the wheel in their hands.
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Click below to listen to the audio recording of the original French text of this article:
- The (written) French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse