Claude Guéant's Anti-Cult Code of Laïcité

Claude Guéant’s Anti-Cult Code of Laïcité

CICNS (November 2011)

On 5 April 2011, the UMP organised a badly prepared and superficial “debate” on laïcité (“Three hours of debate to close two months of polemic”, Le Monde). One of the recommendations at the close of this meeting was to produce a “code of religious liberty”.

The Minister of the Interior, Claude Guéant, has just produced this document (Laïcité et liberté religieuse – Recueil de textes et de jurisprudence, Les éditions des Journaux Officiels). The least one can say is that it is disappointing, since it misses the subject. France is sick with its laïcité; it therefore did not need an insipid compendium of codes and articles of law, but rather to have breathed back into it the spirit of tolerance and openness which should found an “amiable” laïcité. Precious words, because they represent for example shared values, lose their force when they are used at random. That is the case with “laïcité”, a veritable foil, in complete ignorance of the facts, for many inept discourses in the political and media sphere (example: the recurrent confusion, which Claude Guéant does not make, fortunately, between the public/private domain and public/private space, to confine spiritual or religious approaches).

Seen from CICNS, French laïcité can be summed up as follows: a certain number of religions are “recognised”, meaning: their existence is admitted, Islam being nevertheless the object of violent controversies; all the rest, that is to say the spiritual, educational and therapeutic minorities, is put into the great sack of the “cults”, or is in line to be thrown into it at the slightest unsupported suspicion. The contradiction with article 1 of the Constitution, cited by Claude Guéant, ought to leap to the eye: “[the secular Republic] respects all beliefs”. But it apparently suffices to assert one’s good faith (here, as it happens, one’s bad faith) to do exactly the opposite without anyone objecting.

Until now, the Ministry of the Interior had held the reins of the mad horse the MIVILUDES has become. But it does seem that unreason is gaining little by little on this Ministry, notably through the action of the CAIMADES (Cell for assistance and intervention in matters of dérives sectaires), some of whose statements do not fail to alarm (see notably an indigent report made by LCP and an example of the impact of a police raid coordinated by the CAIMADES, now the armed wing of the MIVILUDES), and through the defence of an infamous law: the About-Picard law (this law ought to be repealed). French laïcité, debased, is not “amiable”, and it suffices to look at our European neighbours to note that our secular conception, which the political class likes to claim is envied throughout the world, seems to be the one that generates the most tensions; the anti-cult fight being a glaring aspect of it.

Title IV, chapter 1, Section III of the code is entitled “Fight against dérives sectaires”; ten pages are devoted to this subject.

The hypocrisy of this section’s language is manifest. It consists first in recording that France fights against dérives sectaires, when the current president of the MIVILUDES, Georges Fenech, is a virulent scourge, and that of long standing, of what he calls the “cults” (as he expressed recently, caught by surprise, in an interview given to LyonCapitale: Georges Fenech – “I am a magistrate. I currently preside over an interministerial Mission”; Journalist – “…which fights against the cults”; Georges Fenech – “which fights against the cults”).

The section begins with an extract from the penal code punishing “the fraudulent abuse of the state of ignorance or weakness”, followed by an extract from the About-Picard law punishing the same thing within a “cult movement”, for which it is said that this abuse of weakness can be caused by “psychological subjection”, the legal term proposed at the writing of the law to signify “mental manipulation”. Let us repeat with constancy that the notions of “psychological subjection” and “mental manipulation” are not defined and refer to pseudo-scientific concepts which ought to be excluded from a penal code.

There follows an extract from the Raffarin circular of 2005, then an extract from the circular of 25 February 2008 of the Ministry of the Interior on the fight against dérives sectaires, specifying notably:

“In the absence of a definition of what a cult movement is, it is therefore the notion of public order that is central”.

In these conditions, can Claude Guéant explain how to understand the title of the About-Picard law, “tending to reinforce the prevention and repression of cult movements…”? Could he be the politician who risks saying that the About-Picard law is a summit of parliamentary and governmental hypocrisy? Does the Minister of the Interior also know how to explain in what way the movements listed in the MIVILUDES’s référentiel (and thrown to the media as fodder), accessible to all the public authorities though inaccessible to the persons targeted, have disturbed public order? Can he justify why the MIVILUDES dictates policy in matters of “cults” and not the Ministry of the Interior - the argument of the interministerial character of this action not holding for a second, since the questions posed about Islam, the Catholic Church or another religion (without comment on our part on these questions) are equally of an interministerial nature -?

“I therefore ask you to relaunch the action of the State in the matter of the fight against dérives sectaires”.

Even in 2008, any observer from outside France would have been staggered to hear that France had in the slightest relaxed its pressure on the “cults”. This fight, launched in the 1980s, has steadily grown, combining propaganda and repression.

“I draw your attention to the importance of securing on the legal plane the actions carried out in the matter of the fight against dérives sectaires. Indeed, the authors of dérives sectaires often emerge reinforced from procedures which, for want of being substantiated, lead the services of the State to have their action dismissed, or worse still, to be convicted”.

The minorities savaged in the media and by the government’s anti-cult policy have the effrontery to defend themselves in court and sometimes to win (like the Jehovah’s Witnesses at the European Court, for example: when a civil chamber of a tribunal de grande instance, a court of appeal and a court of cassation are thus called to order, is it a simple error of legal securing, or a deliberate arbitrary action instrumentalising the judicial authority?). But perhaps the grass will soon be cut a little further from under their feet with the immunity of MIVILUDES members, if the corresponding law is voted; what does Claude Guéant think of that? Moreover, how does the Minister of the Interior evaluate his armed interventions in peaceful communities: were they properly “secured” legally?