Misera Carta Privationis

Read in The Guardian of 18 November that the UK Government was pushing for a new bill on nationality and borders that would

• open the possibility for said Government of stripping British citizens of their nationality without noticing them (and hence depriving them from appealing the decision)
• barring anyone arriving in the UK by an illegal route from claiming refugee status
• criminalising anyone trying save an illegal immigrant life
• giving UK Border Force staff immunity from prosecution if their operations result in death

which are failing basic human right principles in the country that established the Magna Carta as a basis for a lawful government… (From a cynic perspective, the 1253 charter was only giving right to a very small fraction of the English population, while serfdom lasted until 1574.) And another illustration of how Brexit is more easily used to cut rights than to establish new ones.

another right uppercut

While at a much lesser scale than the US election result, the outcome of the French Republican primaries of last weekend shows a similar shift to the right of the electorate, who thus favoured the arch-conservative [Thatcherite] François Fillion over the milder center-right Alain Juppé. Some proposals in his program are downright [very much down and very much to the right] scary, among which

1. cancel the 35 hour legal working week and let companies “negociate” up to a 48 hour working week
2. apply an increase of 10% of the VAT, this most unfair of taxes, against a decrease of 40 billions € on company taxes
3. cut 500,000 public sector jobs, increase working hours in the public sector and restrict the status of civil servant to a few ministries
4. prohibit adoption and medically assisted procreation outside heterosexual and married couples
5. collaborate with Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin, including ending sanctions against Russia’s annexation of Crimea,
6. turn the EU into a Europe of Nations (which happens to be the name of the extreme-right group in the European Parliament)
7. rewrite history school programs to deliver a “story of the French Nation” that plainly replace teaching with State indoctrination
8. strip French terrorists of French nationality (a proposal that goes against Article 15 of the Declaration of Human Rights)
9. leave the European Court of Human Rights (as  Theresa May),
10. and ban burkinis from beaches, an obviously definitive answer to all secularism issues!

Scary enough to make me decide to vote against him at the second primary election next Sunday, as the winner is likely to be the next French president. (The alternative is simply terrifying!)

exceptional measures for exceptional circumstances, not as a new normality

Since the mass assassinations of November 13 in Paris, France is in a “legal” state of emergency (état d’urgence). Which has been once again re-conducted a few days by the Parliament and which could even become part of the Constitution if the planned vote succeeds in a few days! Emergency state that gives more and more emergency powers to the executive branch of the French State and thus to the police, with lesser controls from the judiciary and the parliamentary branches of the State. Beyond this arbitrary reduction of civil liberties and rights, from the prohibition of demonstrations to extra-judiciary house arrests, recently denounced by Amnesty International and the UN and many local organisations, the government is pushing for another change in the Constitution that would deprive binationals terrorists of their French nationality. Quite absurd (as if those terrorists cared!), discriminatory (what of Égalité?!), schizophrenic  (“de-naturalising” someone  does not turn him or her into an alien, nor erases the fact that she or he was born and raised in France), and anti-republican… Even though I remain sceptic of their real impact, there are several petitions around calling for the end of the emergency state and the dismissal of the de-naturalisation.