Georges Fenech's Illusionist Act before the Parliamentary Commission on Cults in the Field of Health

Georges Fenech’s Illusionist Act before the Parliamentary Commission on Cults in the Field of Health

By the CICNS (November 2012)

At his hearing of 30 October 2012, Georges Fenech managed to make good, with audacity and a few contrivances, the total absence of proof of any significant delinquency justifying the repressive action of the French public authorities against therapeutic, spiritual and educational minorities. Without wishing to minimise his talent, it must be said that he had before him an “audience of regulars”, not really taken in, well drilled in this farce whose tragedy and human consequences alone seem to escape him.

When Senator Jacques Mézard asks Georges Fenech whether he can “say more about the MIVILUDES’s findings” in terms of proven victims of non-conventional medicine, he puts to him the thorniest question of a perfectly consensual session. Georges Fenech begins with an incredible piece of bluff, at least for those who, like us, know this conjuror’s tricks. He replies: “The examples, you have only to go and look for them in the decisions of the courts and the assize courts”. For those in the know, the reply made by the representative of the Ministry of Justice to this same Georges Fenech, when he was chairing the third parliamentary commission of inquiry into cults in October 2006, comes back to memory: “In 2002, 2003, 2004, we recorded 192 direct or indirect reports and not one more”. Under pressure from the members of the Commission, the official had even had to insist: “For a certain number of files, the problem is indirect, that is to say that we are not even sure of them!”. This figure is to be set beside the properly staggering one of 13 million French people victims of dérives sectaires that Georges Fenech let drop a few minutes earlier, without a shred of proof.

Feigning to rummage among a great many cases, he then pulls out of his sleeve “the Marsaleix affair”, forgetting that on that occasion the anti-cult activists received a real slap in the face, for while one doctor was indeed convicted (with a suspended sentence), the appeal judgment which closes the affair completely clears the other doctor placed under investigation and pursued for 14 years by anti-cult vindictiveness, and dismisses all of UNADFI’s claims, thereby signifying that the “cult context” was not established in the eyes of the courts (See our report on this subject).

Georges Fenech adds that of cases like that “There are plenty of others” and that of affairs of malnutrition of children “we have a lot of them” and that there are “very many” decisions of the criminal courts and the assize courts. But let us allow Georges Fenech to be his own contradictor on the number of children in danger in the “cults”: “I am unable to tell you, er, how many er precisely, how many as closely as possible, there are children concerned by the phenomenon. They say 60,000, perhaps more but… I cannot give you, I have no statistical data. It is very difficult, very difficult to … You know, the work of the MIVILUDES (…)”. And let us refresh his memory: “they” is indeed himself. No senator will play the adversarial role that one would be entitled to expect of an investigative mission faced with these approximations. We hope nevertheless that the lead of a study of the decisions of the courts and the assize courts will be followed up by the commission.

“How is pure charlatanism to be distinguished from the dérive sectaire?” Georges Fenech will quite simply spirit away the second thorny question of the session, using the tried and tested technique of diversion by resorting for a few minutes to various commonplaces on the reasons for the French population’s attraction to non-conventional medicine. Neither the author of the question nor any other member of the commission seemed troubled by the non-reply. In reality, ever since the expression “dérives sectaires” entered the law by the back door of the title of the About-Picard Act, it has proved, juridically, almost inapplicable. It is moreover reassuring that despite the training given by the MIVILUDES at the national school for the judiciary, the courts remain relatively impervious to the use of a term today employed to stigmatise those who disturb not public order, but more probably a certain established order.

Georges Fenech, before having pulled 13 million victims of dérives sectaires out of his hat, had repeated one of his old tricks, by exhibiting the “discovery” he is said to have made in 2006 during a surprise parliamentary visit, of “50 children cut off from the world”. He evokes “mind-boggling” living conditions of children “deprived of care”, completely desocialised, and the death of a baby of the community… We strongly advise our readers to view the report made on the spot by the CICNS following the media hype occasioned by the parliamentary visit. In a few words: as for discovery, the children, thanks to the anti-cult psychosis, were already and had been for years among the most closely watched in France by the education inspectorate and various social services, all of it without any report of children in danger; associating the baby’s death with the community is abusive since the courts, after several years of investigation, had abandoned those suspicions; and, incidentally, unsurprisingly (so accustomed has Georges Fenech made us to the inflation of figures) the children were in fact only 18, as he himself reported in 2006.

These hearings have the look of a pantalonnade. One can read on the subject of this term on Wikipedia that ”(…) the pantalonnade is generally a collective result. It therefore follows more directly from the script than from initiatives coming from the actors…”. We shall not therefore cast a stone at the actors, nor at the authors, so much is the script in this instance a genuinely collective work, but we shall call upon the audience which has been passively attending the revival of the same dismal show for 20 years: before you find yourselves on stage, deprived of your fundamental freedoms, what are you waiting for to call upon the producer *, who is supposed to be at your service?

* The State, which, since 1981, has been the true pillar of anti-cult propaganda.

View the hearings of the Senate commission http://videos.senat.fr/video/videos/2012/video14948.html