Socialist President François Hollande’s tactical move to inscribe into the French constitution a law to strip French nationality from individuals found guilty of terrorist activity, a recurrent theme of the Right, has turned into a political fiasco that may now see it simply abandoned.
The proposition represents Article 2 of a package of amendments to the constitution that also includes transferring what are currently temporary state of emergency powers into a permanent feature of the constitution, a project announced by Hollande in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris last November which left 130 people dead.
The debates on the issue in parliament’s lower house, the National Assembly, forced the government into changing the detail of Article 2; originally aimed at stripping French citizenship from those with dual nationality, the National Assembly last month finally approved the move after it was re-submitted to include all French nationals.
This in effect means that someone convicted of terrorist activity could be made stateless, a condition that goes against the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which dictates that every individual has the right to a nationality, and none should be deprived of one.
The issue has split the ruling Left, and prompted the resignation in January of justice minister Christiane Taubira in protest at the initial proposal targeting only dual-nationals, which was regarded as dividing French society by establishing within the constitution a discriminatory, two-tier treatment of French citizens.
The amendment of the constitution must first be agreed in separate voting by both the National Assembly and the upper house, the Senate. If agreement is reached, its next and final legal stage is the meeting of both houses with the government at a special “Congress” in Versailles, where a fresh vote on the amendment must reach a three-fifths majority.
So it was that after the National Assembly’s approval of the proposed Article 2 on February 9th, the debate was handed to the Senate, which ended this week. On Wednesday, on the eve of the final vote, Prime Minister Manuel Valls appeared before the Senate when he underlined the importance the government and president placed in the Article’s adoption. “We need this symbol,” he said. “The force of the forfeiture of nationality is that it concerns only terrorists.” But by then the house, with a right-wing majority, had amended the proposed text so that it should apply only to individuals with dual nationality, and which was approved in the final vote on Thursday evening. The Senate has, to all evidence, now buried Article 2.
The Senate’s proposed text in effect returns to the original proposition made by President François Hollande on November 16th, at a hurriedly-called Congress meeting in Versailles, three days after the Paris massacres. Addressing both houses of parliament then, he said the stripping of French nationality “should not have the result of making someone stateless” but “we must be able to strip the French nationality from an individual sentenced for attacking the fundamental interest of the nation or a terrorist act, even if they are born French, as of the moment they have the benefit of another nationality”.
It was in order to gain the support of the Socialist Party members of the National Assembly, many of who were strongly opposed to the original terms of Article 2, that the government amended the text to include all French nationals.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
It was with the agreement of the government that the senator who acted as rapporteur for the proposed reform, Philippe Bas of the conservative opposition Républicains party, succeeded in imposing a debate on his amendment to Article 2 before the house considered another amendment calling for the proposed reform to be thrown out, and which was signed by a cross-party group of 70 senators. The result was that the amended Article 2 proposed by Bas was approved by 186 votes to 150 (and eight abstentions), rendering null and void a vote on the proposition to throw out the original text of the reform. It also meant that Valls was spared an illustration of the divisions the reform has caused in his own socialist camp.
The text approved by the Senate on Thursday stipulates that stripping an individual of their nationality “can only concern a person who has been definitively sentenced for a crime that represents a grave attack on the life of the nation and who holds a nationality other than French nationality”. The text notably excluded the stripping of French citizenship from dual nationals convicted of more common crimes, as previously proposed by the Républican party leader, Nicolas Sarkozy.
The government is now in a trap, with just two solutions to escape it. One consists of re-submitting Article 2 for a vote in the National Assembly and again the Senate, when it might hope the MPs and senators reach common ground on a new wording. But after four months of sterile political debate, hope of a concordant outcome appears vain. “If the government makes the text come back to the [National] Assembley, it will be voted on again, I suppose, in the same formulation of the first time,” said Socialist Party MP Patrick Mennucci, the socialist parliamentary group’s main speaker on the issue. “If there are no means for negotiating with the Senate on the question, the reform is off to a bad start. At least concerning Article 2. It would be the burying of the Article.”
The other solution would be to definitively abandon Article 2 and call a meeting of the two parliamentary houses in Congress to vote on Article 1, which concerns the adoption of state of emergency powers into the constitution. The vote would be accompanied by another on the quite different matter of Hollande’s proposed reform of judicial bodies.
Prime Minister Valls has announced he will be meeting with the speakers of both the National Assembly and the Senate, respectively Claude Bartolone and Gérard Larcher, but without detailing the agenda. Contacted by Mediapart, the leader of the Républicains party group in the Senate, Bruno Retailleau said the meeting was due to be held next Tuesday. François Hollande wants to see whether a compromise can be found or not,” he added. “On our side, it is clear that we will not change on the question of statelessness.”
Questioned late Thursday on the sidelines of the European Union leaders meeting in Brussels, François Hollande was hoping to gain time. “I will wait for the Senate to pronounce itself on the whole of the [constitutional reform] text to know what conclusions I should make,” he said. That process will be completed on Tuesday.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse