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In France, Only Journalists Can Film Violence
BostonBTS sends word that the French Constitutional Council has just made it illegal to film violence unless you are a professional journalist (or to distribute a video containing violence). The law was approved exactly 16 years after amateur videographer George Holliday filmed Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King. The Council was tidying up a body of law about offenses against the public order, and wanted to ban "happy slapping." A charitable reading would be that the lawmakers stumbled into unintended consequences. Not according to Pascal Cohet, a spokesman for French online civil liberties group Odebi: "The broad drafting of the law so as to criminalize the activities of citizen journalists unrelated to the perpetrators of violent acts is no accident, but rather a deliberate decision by the authorities, said [Cohet]. He is concerned that the law, and others still being debated, will lead to the creation of a parallel judicial system controlling the publication of information on the Internet."
The French Constitutional Council has a position similar to the U.S. Supreme Court, except it only rules to decide whether or not a law is constitutional (respects the French Constitution of the Vth Republic, Human Rights, etc).
Another difference with the U.S. Supreme Court is that it can actually be seized (by Members of Parliament) before a law is voted on by Parliament itself. For instance, if some people introduce a law saying Linux is illegal and should be banned, it is highly possible that the Constitutional Council would be seized by MPs sympathetic to Linux. It is therefore, considered as the guardian of the Constitution and of Human Rights.
On the other hand, it is sad to note that its evolution has also mimicked the recent evolution of the U.S. Supreme Court: President Jacques Chirac has packed the Constitutional Council with conservative (sometimes ultra-conservatives) judges, people who can be extremely authoritarian (by French standards -- they would be considered as dangerous lefties in the U.S.) and sympathetic to his positions. And these positions probably include a lot of censorship of the Internet.
So, IMHO, it's not a surprise this stupid law is now passed in France. The ultimate appeal, of course, would be for a French Citizen to bring his/her case to the European Court of Human Rights, which could overturn the Constitutional Council decision as well as any and all court decision on such a matter. But that would probably take years of hard legal work, with all legal fees you can imagine.
Yes, this is bad news. As a French citizen, I am personally ashamed the Constitutional Council has taken such a position, especially since, as you mentioned, "happy slapping" videos could already be prosecuted under French Law as not helping someone in danger (Good Samaritan Law?), or even as being an accomplice to assault and battery. In France, if you see something, you have to do something!
In short: stupid, stupid, stupid. And shameful, to boot.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
I would hazard to say less French might have died if they had decided to fight from the beginning and not just after the occupation in a clandestine manner.
Can we please lay this stupid myth to rest?
The French did fight, and fought hard; France suffered more battlefield deaths during WW2 than the US did. They surrendered because they were beaten, by an army -- the Wehrmacht -- that was unquestionably the best in the world at that time; quite possibly, allowing for technological changes over time, the best in history. And had London or Moscow or, yes, Washington DC had the misfortune to be as close to Berlin as Paris is, they would have suffered the same fate. There was simply no one in the world who could beat the Germans on the battlefield at that point; it took the surviving Allies years of catch-up, protected by the Channel, the Atlantic, and the simple size of Russia, to match them.
No one ever accuses the Poles and the Czechs of cowardice for falling to the Blitzkrieg, or the British for Dunkirk, or the Russians for being driven back across a piece of their country far larger than France in its entirety, or the Americans for waiting two years while Hitler ran wild. And anyone who believes that cowardice is part of the French national character should go count the graves at Verdun.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.