RIGHTS-FRANCE: Prison Sentencing for Children Challenged

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Aug 20 2002 (IPS) - The amendment of law to allow prison sentences for children above 13 years is being challenged strongly by rights groups.

Minister of the interior Nicolas Sarkozy defends the new measures against children as “proof that we politicians have listened to the desperate cry of French citizens.” But human rights groups, teachers, social scientists, and legal experts are denouncing the amendment as propagandistic and counterproductive.

The new measures in the French criminal code were passed hurriedly August 2, the last day of the parliamentary term before the summer break.

The amendments passed were even tougher than those proposed by justice minister Dominique Perben. The final measures provide for prison sentences against children above 13, and “educational sanctions” against children above 10, with cancellation of financial aid their parents were getting.

The amendments provide for imprisonment and fines for students who attack their teachers. They permit anonymous depositions that can lead to three-year sentences.

The ‘reforms’ will cost 3.5 billion dollars over the next five years. About 11,000 new prison cells will be built, and 25,000 new judicial jobs will be created, including 14,000 new police posts.

“The reform assigns too much money and will demand an intense personnel investment solely for imprisonment of children, to the detriment of educational and psychological work,” says Jacques Bouygues, director of a prison programme for children between 16 and 18 years in the southern city Marseille.

“The new legislation feeds the illusion that prison improves people’s behaviour and should therefore be an aim by itself,” he says.

Legal expert Philip Cohen says the ‘reform’ is “responding more to political propagandistic will than to real administration of justice.” The new criminal code will bring about “chaotic administration of justice and grave risks of paralysis in judicial processes due to the growing incoherence of our laws,” he says.

Michel Tubiana, president of the French League of Human Rights, says the provision for anonymous witness depositions is “ethically unacceptable and legally dangerous.”

The European Convention on Human Rights denounces such a procedure, he says, “because it diminishes the rights of the defence by hindering open debates with witnesses before the judges or the jury.”

Tubiana says the government has undertaken spectacular police actions only in poor neighbourhoods around the country’s big cities like Paris, Lyon and Marseille. “The actions are directed against a population that is already discredited and seen as prone to petty crime,” Tubiana says.

The poor outskirts of big French cities are mainly populated by immigrants. Recent police raids in these neighbourhoods have brought only minimal results in arresting criminals or in seizing drugs or stolen goods.

Sarkozy defended the actions because they “document our will to be in place and to restore the authority of the state.”

François Dubet, author of a report on criminal youth, says the provision of punishment for students accused of attacking teachers is “demagogical and counterproductive.” The measures will not change the behaviour of troublesome children “but will embarrass teachers and professors,” he says. “Imagine a professor confronting a prison sentence against one of her 13-year-old students as a result of her complaint. It is going to be terrible.”

The amendment makes police officers and judges the main protagonists in the school, Dubet says. “If we continue this way, very soon teachers will spend more time managing their complaints and those of the parents of affected children, than in preparing their classes.”

The left-wing newspaper Libération has published a series of statements made by present ministers during earlier parliamentary debates when they were in opposition. Deputy minister of the interior Patrick Devedjian was found to have said in a debate two years ago: “We must avoid putting children in prison, for it means the best, and most dreaded school of crime.” Devedjian is now among the strongest supporters of prison sentences for children above 13 years of age.

Pierre Albertini, a right-wing deputy who supported the new law had said a year earlier: “We cannot formulate a criminal law policy by focusing our attention on petty urban delinquency.” He had said: “We have to act on the causes of this petty crime, instead of only thinking about repressing troubling behaviour.”