Interview with Jean-Pierre Joseph on the Theme of "Cults"

In this interview with CICNS, Jean-Pierre Joseph gives his critical, first-hand account of the sequence running from December 1995 into January 1996 in France: the publication of the first parliamentary report on “cults” with its list of 172 movements, the discovery of sixteen bodies in the Vercors, and the police operations that followed. Speaking as a lawyer, he questions the timing of these events and the legal weight of the parliamentary list. What follows is his own testimony and his own interpretation of that sequence.

CICNS interview. (English translation of the interview published on the CICNS YouTube channel on 11 November 2006. The French transcript was machine-transcribed from the video and cleaned before translation; passages the machine could not reliably hear are marked [inaudible].)

[Interviewer]: Maître Jean-Pierre Joseph is a lawyer at the Grenoble bar. He has been led to handle several cases involving minorities or individuals discriminated against because of their spiritual paths or their alternative health practices. He speaks to us here about the context in which the 1995 parliamentary report on cults was published, one of the first large-scale actions undertaken by the public authorities as part of a policy of discrimination against spiritual minorities.

[Joseph]: Around 15 December 1995, a television crew from a public channel makes a report on an agrarian group, an agrarian community — a report which, according to them, will be sympathetic. So the group is reassured: “Don’t worry, we will simply talk about your experience of organic farming, there will be no problem.” What the group does not know is that this report will be entirely rigged, that questions and answers will be mixed together, that sentences will be cut, in such a way that, when it is broadcast on air at prime time, these people will appear completely crazy.

One week later, on 22 December 1995 — and ratified following the ratification by the National Assembly of the Prime Minister — the first anti-cult report, the list of 172 movements, is published in the Journal officiel. It is 22 December 1995. One might tell oneself it is a coincidence: a public channel makes a report, which has not yet been broadcast; one week later, publication of the anti-cult report. But it does not stop there. It must be pointed out that this anti-cult report was ratified by the National Assembly by the unanimous vote of the 7 deputies present. So 172 movements were examined in 50 minutes. There again, that is a peculiarity — which comes to 20 seconds per file, if you do the arithmetic.

On 23 December, the day after the publication of this report in the Journal officiel, 16 charred bodies are discovered in the Vercors, and we are told it is a mass suicide. Who is on the scene before everyone else? Who is going to give 54 interviews in 48 hours? Who is going to announce to France: “I, national specialist, great and competent man, assure you that this is a mass suicide. I am going to steer the investigation.”? The answer, with hyphens: Mister-national-anti-cult-psychiatrist-on-mission-for-the-government. The day after — as if by chance — the publication of the anti-cult report in the Journal officiel.

Twelve days later, around 4 January 1996, a programme watched by a great many people is broadcast on a major national channel at 8.30 p.m., in which the whole of France is going to be thrown into panic with two subjects: the first group I was telling you about earlier, an entirely rigged report, and this so-called true-false mass suicide, on which Mister national anti-cult psychiatrist is going to speak — and is of course going to forget to say, because normally he does not know it, he is going to forget to tell us that these 16 collective suicides all have several bullets in their bodies, and that they were burned with flamethrowers, which the case file would teach us 5 years later.

On 5 January 1996, at 6 in the morning — that is, less than 12 hours after the broadcast of the programme — police and gendarmerie operations take place in numerous minority groups in France, classified as cults, under commission rogatoire. Now, the lawyers understood straight away, but for non-lawyers it is not obvious: what is the point, what is the scoop in this piece of information? A commission rogatoire is a delegation that an investigating judge gives to the police or the gendarmerie to carry out acts he cannot perform himself. A commission rogatoire, when there is no complaint — and there was none — requires that the public prosecutor’s office has asked an investigating judge to open an inquiry into a specific fact, an offence. When there is no complaint, and the prosecutor’s office asks for that, it means it has received instructions from the Ministry of Justice; that is something of an entirely normal way of operating. This whole process, between the circular from the Ministry of Justice that comes down to the various prosecutors’ offices of France and on to investigating judges, takes at least three weeks. At least three weeks: we are just after the Christmas holidays, which means — and unfortunately this is inescapable — that the instructions from the Ministry of Justice took place before the mass suicide, as if by chance. What a coincidence, is it not?

So of course, when we realised all this, some time later, we asked ourselves: but what is the point? What is the point of artificially launching, in a concerted, organised way, a great fear of spiritual minorities? The answer came to us a few months later. In 1996, we were at the very beginning of the Internet, and the National Council of the Order of Physicians sends circulars over the Internet to the rare doctors who, at the time, already had Internet access, telling them: “Beware of alternative medicines, beware of homeopaths, they are all recruiters for cults.”

At the end of 1996 or the beginning of 1997 — I no longer remember exactly — when the first victims of the hepatitis B vaccine, suffering from multiple sclerosis, came onto a television set, facing Bernard Kouchner. What did Bernard Kouchner reply to them? “Your information comes from the cults.” And that is when we understood. That is when we understood, because, naturally, instead of causing 2,000 victims, as at the outset, well, the hepatitis B vaccine would have caused, according to an expert in pharmacovigilance, 60,000 people with serious neurological illness. But it went on, since it came from the cults.

When Professor Beljanski was arrested — the man who treated François Mitterrand, thanks to whom François Mitterrand finished his seven-year term with dignity; Professor Beljanski, who treated hundreds of cancer and AIDS patients, with success. When this good man was arrested — he was 73 years old, he lived with his wife and his secretary, there were three of them in a house — the 180 gendarmes who came to that house, plus a helicopter and the GIGN: “Sir, you are a cult,” they told him. Oh yes. There were three of them.

One could multiply examples of this kind. All the people — and in particular the scientists — who had solutions to society’s problems were neutralised. That is also the reason why, at the very start of the dates I gave you, in mid-December 1995, the group which, thanks to an age-old technique, manages to practise giant-scale organic farming, without pesticides, without chemical fertilisers — so no more need to poison the earth — that group too, of course, was classified as a cult, obviously. Those are the reasons for the anti-cult psychosis. France bears a heavy responsibility for this idiotic psychosis, which we all believed in at the start.

The parliamentary reports content themselves with saying: “We have classified 172 movements that we consider to be cults.” The conditions in which this work was carried out strip these operations of all seriousness. The list from the Renseignements généraux was simply copied out. That means that no serious study was made — notably of the group I was telling you about earlier, the Agrer group, which practises giant-scale organic farming. The parliamentarians — and in particular, I believe, the chairman or the vice-chairman of the parliamentary commission — came knocking at their doors. “We have come to inform you of the fact that you are a cult. — But sir, do you know what we do? — You are a cult. — Ah yes, but do you know? — No, you are a cult. Goodbye sir, thank you.” Photos, cameras, and so on. That is how it happened.

So this report is a masquerade. It has no legitimacy. Moreover, a few years later, the Ministry of the Interior wrote to a large spiritual group: “The parliamentary report has no legal value.” No legal value whatsoever.