The political sinking of French justice minister Christiane Taubira

AfterAfter the election of François Hollande as French president in May 2012, his freshly-appointed justice minister Christiane Taubira, who began her political career as a member of the independence movement in her native French Guyana, soon became something of an icon for the country’s Left as she spearheaded the promotion of the socialist government’s bill of law for the introduction of same-sex marriages.

Now, more than three years on, and after minimal justice reforms, Taubira, 63, has kept her job while keeping largely silent over the government’s swing towards liberal economic policies and the adoption of intrusive security measures. As a result, she has come to unwillingly represent the dismay of an electorate that is increasingly losing faith in the socialist administration it elected.

The terrorist attacks in Paris on the evening of November 13th were to be revealing of this. Immediately after news of the attacks emerged, Taubira arrived at the Elysée Palace office of President Hollande, where she joined Prime Minister Manuel Valls and interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve. The four went together to visit the site of the Bataclan music hall at the end of the terrorist siege which claimed the lives of 90 of the 130 people who died in the attacks that night. She was also with Hollande, Valls and Cazeneuve when they announced the new security measures to be taken after the events.

Taubira paid stirring tributes to the victims, during which she appeared visibly moved, and announced there would be an increase in the numbers of magistrates assigned to the anti-terrorist branch of the public prosecutor’s office.

But she also largely kept quiet as others stepped onto her jurisdiction. As justice minister, she is the guardian of the constitution and public freedom, but it was interior minister Cazeneuve rather than justice minister Taubira who first suggested the prolongation of the state of emergency powers introduced immediately after the attacks. It was again Cazeneuve who convinced  Hollande that some of those sweeping powers should be permanently featured in the constitution. Similarly, it was not her but Prime Minister Valls who raised the idea of a new anti-terrorist law.

Some of those close to Taubira say she is opposed to a number of proposals contained in these projects, including, as she this week publicly declared, the stripping of French nationality from those who hold dual nationality and are found guilty of terrorist crimes. Questioned about the issue on Europe 1 radio on November 17th (see video below) she replied: “It’s an engagement made by the president. We have worked on [the question of] of legal constraints, and on our international obligations.” Pressed further, she added: “The question is not to know whether I am in favour.”

Questioned about the issue last Tuesday, December 22nd, during an official visit to Algeria, Taubira told local radio station Chaîne 3: “I can tell you for example that the project for the constitutional revision which will be presented at the ministerial cabinet meeting on Wednesday will not include this reform.” She added that the stripping of French nationality from dual nationals who had obtained French citizenship because they were born in France was a “key problem for the fundamental principle of national rights by birthplace, to which I am profoundly attached”.

But at the following day's cabinet meeting of the French government in Paris she was brought back into line by Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who insisted that the measure will be included in the proposed reform of the constitutioin to be submitted to parliament early next year.  Furthermore, the justice minister will, in second place behind Valls, lead the argument in parliament for the adoption of the reform of the constitution to include both that proposal and several other state of emergency powers that were until now temporary.

She has kept quiet over the catalogue of ramped up security measures and proposals borrowed directly from the Right, even the far-right. Among these is the government’s idea of introducing preventive detention for individuals who are considered by the intelligence services to be radicalized Islamists, about which the Constitutional Council has been asked for its opinion. The thousands of house searches and placing of people under house arrest, decided without consultation with the judiciary, have become a daily reality, establishing a grey legal area.

Disquiet and division over the state of emergency powers was illustrated earlier this month by the resignation of magistrate Dominique Coujard from his position as president of a think tank close to the Socialist Party, Law, Justice and Security (DJS), after his proposed motion denouncing the “inappropriate” use of emergency powers for “purely political and communication reasons” was rejected by a majority of his DJS colleagues.

Taubira’s entourage insist that she is discreetly at work, behind the scenes in inter-ministerial meetings, trying to place what one called “a bit of law” in the security drive. But the results are thin on the ground.

Conservative Senator Claude Malhuret was one of few among his opposition Les Républicains party (formerly the UMP) to oppose the law giving mass surveillance powers to the security services which was adopted by parliament earlier this year and which was at the time sharply criticized by rights campaigners and the United Nations. He told Mediapart that he found Taubira was “ill at ease” with the controversial reform. “She hardly appeared at the Senate, intervening only for the aspect concerning the prisons,” Malhuret said. “On the two occasions when she appeared alone before the house she read from her notes.”

One government minister, whose name is withheld, said the justice minister only involved herself in the preparations for the law on questions that directly concerned her administration. “Otherwise we never saw her in the inter-ministerial meetings,” he said.

Several well-placed sources told Mediapart that Taubira has withdrawn herself from anti-terrorist policy issues, either because she lacks proper knowledge of them or because she knows that the battle against the hardliners is lost in advance. “She doesn’t understand much about them, it’s not her culture or her generation,” said a Socialist Party Member of Parliament (MP) who supports her, whose name is also withheld. “She has not integrated the subject in her [political] reflection.”

Her voluntary absenteeism was illustrated during the debate over the new accord on judicial cooperation between France and Morocco in June, designed to put an end to earlier bilateral strains and which was strongly opposed by rights groups. The drafting of the agreement was, in any case, largely managed by the foreign affairs ministry.

As for the controversy surrounding the death in 2014 of Rémi Fraisse, a 21-year-old botany student and environmental activist killed by a grenade launched by riot police during protests over the building of a dam in Sivens, south-west France, Taubira limited her public comments to a message on her Twitter account (see above): “Rémi Fraisse, a young life snatched away, shattered promise, thoughts that crash into each other, but in the end a certitude, implacable: No to that!” Meanwhile she accepted without protest the move by interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve that it should be the public prosecutor in the nearby town of Albi who should serve as spokesman for the developments in the investigation, and not the regional prefect, the French government's administrative representative.

'She's champing at the bit, she's unhappy'

In face of the criticism aimed at her, Taubira confines herself to underlining past achievements and the importance of the series of reforms planned between now and 2017, which include the trimming of court-house bureaucracy, the modernizing of civil contract laws, and prison renovations. Little, or none, of which will produce headline-grabbing attention.

But there have been notable successes since 2012. The justice administration has launched a recruitment campaign to compensate from the cuts made under former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s reform of public sector spending that began in 2007. Meanwhile, the public prosecutor services no longer receive direct political instructions, and the newly-formed public prosecutor’s office for financial crimes (the parquet national financier, or PNF) – created after the tax evasion scandal of socialist budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac, first revealed by Mediapart - is gaining a strong foothold in anti-corruption probes.

But above all, and unlike her stance regarding anti-terrorist policies, Taubira showed battling determination over her 2013 bill of law to reform sentencing for crimes of delinquency, as opposed to more serious crimes, which included giving magistrates the power to decide individually-adapted punishments, such as probation, instead of delivering blanket prison terms. It was attacked by the Right for supposed leniency, and also by then-interior minister, now prime minister, Manuel Valls. President François Hollande leaned largely in favour of Valls, but Taubira was able to count on the support of a significant number of socialist MPs who, adding amendments, helped the integrity of the original bill make its way through parliament. It was adopted it in July 2014.

It was a period when Taubira enjoyed a certain base of support from MPs and thinkers on the Left. She still incarnated the hopes of the left-wing electorate who rallied behind Hollande in the 2012 presidential elections, and delighted them with her sharp-witted comments that often made her critics on the Right appear has-beens. She was the target, and still is, of outragious and disguised racist comments that have - and she has not always been leant sufficient support by the presidency.

“She already opened up to us, it tired her a great deal,” said a former member of her ministry cabinet. “Above all when the blows also affected those close to her.” The source, who asked not to be named, said he saw in this one of the reasons for her silence since Manuel Valls was appointed prime minister in April 2014, and notably since the resignation in the summer of 2014 of industry minister Arnaud Montebourg, culture minister Aurélie Filippetti and education minister Benoît Hamon. The three, who resigned in protest at the government’s austerity policies, who were close to Taubira.

Mediapart understands that she had considered leaving the government, and sought out the opinions of her entourage, and former ministers, including veteran socialist Pierre Joxe. According to sources close to her, she finally decided to remain in post so as “to weigh from the inside”. One commented that she has no hesitation in making a stand “and going to see Hollande when it’s needed”. Former education minister Benoît Hamon has spoken of a meeting with her at the justice ministry in the company of Arnaud Montebourg and Aurélie Filippetti shortly after they all left government in August 2014. “She told us ‘I’m not in the same situation as you, I still have reforms underway',” he recalled.

Already in December 2013, speaking in a live debate organised by Mediapart (see video below), Taubira summed up her position as follows: “The scene is the Amazon basin. There is a forest fire. The hummingbird decides to bring back one drop of water at a time. The other animals make fun of it, saying ‘You think you can put out the fire with that?’. It replies: ‘I do my bit’. Me, I do my bit each day.”

Taubira’s decision to stay in government no doubt resides in several considerations, including her political career. “Have you ever been a minister?” asked, sarcastically, one of her former staff. “No? Well you would see, it’s also quite nice to be a minister.” Taubira once confided to a former minister to whom she is close that if she resigned, her political career was over, for she has no electoral mandate. “She has a lovely sincerity which is rare,” he commented, adding (in echo to others) that it was best that she was in the job as justice minister rather than another.

Hollande and Valls are keen to keep Taubira in government because she is the only minister whose image still reassures left-wing militants. But the condition for staying put is that she keeps quiet. “She’s champing at the bit, she’s unhappy,” said another source close to government. “Valls asked her to shut up and to not pronounce a single criticism.”

She is all the more unhappy in that some of the key pledges of the 2012 election campaign are regularly postponed, whether by the president, the prime minister or parliament. These include the reform to guarantee the independence of the public prosecutor’s office, the reform of minors’ rights, and the reinforcing of the law governing the protection of journalists’ sources. France’s prisons and court houses remain dilapidated, while the reform to increase legal aid for people on low incomes proved an obstacle course. One of the major political defeats for Taubira was the government’s veto of the proposed “social amnesty”, a bill of law submitted by the radical-left and supported by her which would have allowed a legal amnesty for trades union militants facing criminal charges over site occupations and violent behaviour.

'She has confidence in no-one'

There are doubts within legal and political circles that Taubira will ever see through the projects she has lined up between now and 2017.

“We have no contact with the minister, just a few exchanges on technical matters with her inner cabinet,” complained Florian Borg, president of the left-leaning Union of French Lawyers (SAF). “She came to our congress in November 2012, but the following year we were given just a video, and [it arrived] late because the ministry got the email address wrong. Since then, no other response.”

Borg said that when the SAF, in September 2013, launched a protest movement against the cuts in certain legal aid subsidies, neither “the minister, nor her cabinet, came to us”. He called it “the proof of a true lack of political sense”. In the absence of contact with the justice ministry, the SAF directly approached the prime minister’s office and the finance ministry. “We are a left-wing union, there is a left-wing government,” commented Borg. “But we don’t speak the same language with the [justice] minister. The only time that I obtained a direct reply from Christiane Taubira was by calling France Inter [radio station] to put a question to her on-air on October 15th [see video below]. “This is not a minister who weighs from the inside on government choices. She loses her arbitrations.”

The left-leaning magistrates’ union, the Syndicat de la magistrature (SM), shares Borg's disappointment. “We had a bit of hope in 2013, but here, politically, it’s a catastrophe,” said the union’s president Françoise Martres. “The minister says nothing when the police demonstrate below her windows, on October 14th, to demand greater prison sentences.” Shortly after that demonstration (see more here), Taubira appeared at a press conference with Valls and interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve during which the prime minister announced a series of measures to appease the police protest. “On questions of importance, whether they be about issues of liberties or the economy, with the dismantling of the labour laws and the industrial tribunals we cannot support the justice initiatives of this government,” said Martres.

On a more anecdotal note, Taubira’s ministerial cabinet is one of the most unstable of any. In the space of three years, four chiefs of staff have succeeded each other (along with their deputies). “She neither looks after her cabinet nor the management of major ministry departments,” said one former justice ministry official. “Information doesn’t circulate.” He was, he said, once in admiration of the minister’s culture, her lyricism and easy verbal skills, and her ardent combat against racism and social exclusion, but says that today he is disillusioned and bitter.

"The minister doesn’t want to be called to account, [she] has confidence in no-one, and doesn’t give clear instructions," the former ministry official added. “When she’s in difficulty, she get out of it with phrases like ‘I am nobody’s donkey. I’ve a house in Cayenne [in French Guyana] waiting for me, with a library that opens onto the sky’. And inevitably, when there’s a clanger […] it’s the members of the cabinet who pay.”

A former chief of staff to Taubira was more clement. “She is stressed because she works enormously, including at night,” he said. “With her, we’re not around for amusement. She’s a woman who knows her files. She wants to read and understand absolutely everything she’s asked to sign.”

Other former staff complain of the difficulty in keeping up with Taubira’s timetable, and in dealing with her character."Yes, she has a difficult character, but you need to know how to tell her ‘no’," said one. “When there’s resistance, she’s happy with it.”

While with each government reshuffle she is tipped for the exit – or possibly a move to the culture ministry – she could, perhaps, remain in her post until the presidential and parliamentary elections due in 2017. In what could be argued to be symbolic of Hollande’s presidency, this once flamboyant figure of the Left is in the process of becoming a modest hummingbird, relegated to the rank of minister for victims and poetry, one that no longer wins her battles but who refuses to resign.

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• The French version of this article can be found here.

English version by Graham Tearse