MIVILUDES

MIVILUDES, the Mission Interministérielle de Vigilance et de Lutte contre les Dérives Sectaires, is the French state’s interministerial mission in charge of the question of “sectes” (cults), attached to the Prime Minister. What this entry records beyond that is the critique of one advocacy group: CICNS, a French association whose stated objectives include ending the association between criminality and spiritual minorities. In its proposal for an independent observatory of spiritual minorities, CICNS writes that MIVILUDES has recently hardened its action, encourages a resolutely repressive approach, and has chosen to dissociate itself from the work of the leading sociologists of religion.

Policing belief beyond public order

CICNS argues that MIVILUDES does not confine itself to watching over strict respect for public order: by designating what is dangerous and what is not, the mission intervenes in the space of liberty of conscience guaranteed by Article 1 of France’s 1905 law. It also argues that MIVILUDES’s generalisation of the term “secte” (applied, in CICNS’s view, without sufficient expertise beyond strict public-order matters) de facto removes the targeted groups from the theoretically protective frame of French laïcité.

Criticism from inside the French state

The reservations CICNS cites are not only its own. It points to Didier Leschi, head of the Central Bureau of Religions at the French Interior Ministry, who presented to the 2006 parliamentary inquiry an alternative to MIVILUDES’s position, centred on the respect of public order, and who criticised the mission’s approximate approach.

Researchers excluded

CICNS says the social-science researchers who have seriously studied the “sectes” question are generally excluded from the field of action of bodies like MIVILUDES, bodies which, it says, offer tools of repression rather than reflection.