Cults: Social Scourge or Scapegoat? Laurent Hincker at the CICNS Colloquium

Laurent Hincker is a lawyer who also teaches legal sociology at university, and the author of « Sectes, rumeurs et tribunaux » (“Cults, rumours and courts”, La Nuée Bleue). In this address at the CICNS colloquium « Sectes : fléau social ou bouc émissaire ? » (“Cults: social scourge or scapegoat?”), he speaks about the defamation proceedings that followed the French parliamentary reports on “cults”, and about a case he argued before the European Court of Human Rights.

CICNS colloquium address. (English translation of the address published on the CICNS YouTube channel on 4 April 2011. 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 Laurent Hincker has been a lawyer in Strasbourg since 1971 and is an associate professor of universities. He is a recognised specialist in Community and European law, in the field of human rights, in the law of persons and the family, and in criminal law. He is the author of « Sectes, rumeurs et tribunaux » (“Cults, rumours and courts”), published by La Nuée Bleue, a book written following cases that brought him up against militants of the anti-cult struggle.

In the course of his address, he describes the legal context of the debate surrounding spiritual minorities and shares his experience in the field.

[Hincker]: Good morning. Let me introduce myself: my name is Laurent Hincker. I am a lawyer. I also teach at the university in Strasbourg, more specifically in legal sociology. And then I am a human-rights activist, since from the age of 20 I have carried out several missions, notably for Amnesty International and the International Federation for Human Rights, in Morocco and in the countries of Central Europe, where liberties were oppressed.

Recently I was at [inaudible ?], at Dachau, during these holidays — incidentally, because I was passing through Munich and I did not know that Dachau was 20 minutes from Munich, by metro. And then I discovered, in an extraordinary exhibition moreover, in that place of memory, that besides the Gypsies, the Jews, the political opponents, from 1933 onwards there were the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who were in the [inaudible ?], who were interned there and of whom quite a few died in that camp.

As for me, it is in that context — I am speaking to you of the place of my professional practice — that I was led to take an interest in this fight, because, like every lawyer, we receive briefs, and when the Steiner schools and the anthroposophist movement — well known in Alsace, well known in Germany, well known in Switzerland, well known in the Scandinavian countries — came in 1999 saying: “Listen, it seems we are a cult, what can we do?”, I was dumbfounded, as indeed were many others, and we began to initiate proceedings, because, as you say, there is not much to be done on the political level for the moment, so there remains the legal fight. And there, one very quickly realises too that there is not much to be done either, except to sue for defamation.

And we had the great good fortune that Monsieur Guyard, who was the rapporteur of the second commission, in 1999, on cults and money, declared in a television interview — I believe it was on Antenne 2 — he spoke of the anthroposophists, saying that they were a dangerous cult, that it did anything and everything. And so we were able to sue on that basis — because theoretically, of course, the parliamentary reports themselves cannot be attacked — and we were able to sue, and we succeeded, before the 17th criminal chamber of Paris, in having Monsieur Guyard convicted for the defamatory remarks he had made, which was, after all, quite extraordinary.

On that occasion, we discovered in particular how parliamentary reports are manufactured in France, since — as you underlined a moment ago — on television there are no adversarial debates, but in the parliamentary reports there are none either, since it is done in a totally inquisitorial manner, on the basis of reports from the RG (Renseignements généraux), of witnesses heard anonymously, without giving the floor to the principal parties concerned, to ask them, after all: what is this about, can you explain it to us? And this also contravenes the international recommendations.

So that is on the national level. On the international level, in Strasbourg, we have the Council of Europe — there are, after all, 46 member countries in that institution, and a European Court of Human Rights sitting there, which is the guarantor of the freedom of expression, of thought and of religion of 800 million Europeans and 200 million foreigners living in those countries — so nearly a billion people in Europe living in those 46 countries. And the Council of Europe has always said that there should be no specific law in the European countries and that, in any event, if there were recommendations to make, it was to have centres of information — but centres of information where, adversarially, the information given by the principal parties concerned themselves, that is to say the associations labelled as cults, would be taken into account — and that beyond that, one could, if need be, in a second phase, set up a European observatory, which to my knowledge has never seen the light of day, for lack of means. Obviously, if all the money we give — the subsidies currently given to associations to fight against the cults, and which squander them in quite extraordinary fashion — were given instead to actually implement the recommendations of the Council of Europe and create a European observatory at that level, the money, it seems to me, would no doubt be better used.

Second trial — you spoke of the media. Well, following the conviction we obtained of Mr Guyard — let me reassure you straight away, the justice system is nobody’s fool: on appeal, the judges kicked the ball into touch by saying: he did, after all, express himself within the framework of the parliamentary report, even though the report had been tabled, and in the end they said: there is defamation, certainly, but well, he was acting in good faith. So there you are. The collusion between the magistrates and the political sphere was obvious, so the loop was closed: move along, nothing to see.

Now, as for the media: an association came to see me afterwards, which was the SRCM, the Shri Ram Chandra Mission, an association I knew no more about than that. That association, too, had purely and simply been catalogued as a cult. And there, it was quite extraordinary, because it was a programme of Mr Dechavanne’s, in a programme of sinister memory called Ciel, mon mardi — since then he has reoffended in other programmes. And as you say, against the image there is nothing to be done: the image was terrifying, and facing it we have only words — words to say it. And there, Mr Dechavanne, obviously, in the setting of an absolute putting-to-death… well, a bullfight atmosphere, etc. — indeed between bullfighting images, it seems to me, since that same evening he had dealt with several subjects, including notably that of the cults — brings on a gentleman called [inaudible ?], who, weeping, begins to say: I no longer have my children, the cults stole my child from me, that cult in particular stole my child from me. He tells [inaudible ?], he tells the story.

And in the end, the Shri Ram Chandra Mission said to me: listen, we are going to sue. Here we go again: 17th criminal chamber. Mr [inaudible ?] arrives, and he is told: sir, you said this, this and this — a cult is supposed to have taken your children away — so what tangible elements do you have? In fact, he had none. It was utterly false; it was nothing but lies. And on our side, by contrast, we had, from his ex-wife, a court decision showing that he was an abusive father, that his children had been entrusted by the French justice system — by the family-affairs judges — to the mother, and that it was in that context that the children left and could no longer see that father except in the setting of a supervised contact centre, as is the case for all maltreating children.

This, to show you what a degree of manipulation and instrumentalisation we have now reached in France today — and with complete impunity. Because that same [inaudible ?], convicted by the 17th criminal chamber — I remind you that someone who is convicted at criminal law is called a delinquent; he appealed, and it was upheld by the court of appeal — that same [inaudible ?] was heard again by Monsieur Fenech during the 3rd parliamentary commission, on children, a year ago, and said exactly the same thing again. Which goes to show that Monsieur Fenech, who this time chaired that commission, could not have cared less about what the 17th chamber had done in naming that person a delinquent, in saying that what he was doing was mendacious, that it was fabrications, that it was completely fantasised. And we start again with a new parliamentary report on cults and the child.

That is what I had, briefly, to say to you — knowing that behind all this, the reflection that has always interested me is to know what, in the end, a cult is — obviously, since when I was confronted with this, as I said, there is no legal definition — but beyond that, what a dérive sectaire is. And in my present context, I am led — because these are obligatory way-stations for us; my work on those two associations, then others afterwards, being finished — today I work a great deal with an association fighting moral harassment, which is a problem that concerns women who are maltreated not by physical violence but by psychological violence.

And in that framework, we are confronted essentially — it is women in relation to men, but sometimes, let me reassure you, it can also be men in relation to women; there are a few who are victims of that — and we discover what are called perverts and cult systems within families, where there are genuine dérives sectaires.

So what does a dérive sectaire consist of, in the end — and I believe the debate should be broadened — what is it, how might it work? They are phenomena of perversion. Now, it is easier to spot when it is a person than when it is a system, but it can perfectly well be applied to a system. They are people who deal in seduction, in manipulation, instrumentalisation, projection — what they reproach others with, they do themselves — enormous problems in the relationship to money, and who in the end cast themselves as victims. I am sketching this very quickly.

You find this enormously in companies — dérives sectaires. Moral harassment in the company: there has been a specific law since Madame Hirigoyen, in two celebrated books, threw this problem into relief — two specific laws that exist to combat this problem of harassment and these dérives sectaires in companies.

We have this problem today in families, enormously, and there, there is no law at all, and we have tens and tens and hundreds and thousands of people in France who are victims of it. And that would truly deserve a parliamentary report — that parliamentarians should look into this problem — because physical violence is easy to deal with; psychological violence, we cannot manage to deal with it today in France.

And then, it is true that sometimes — I was speaking about it earlier with someone in the room, who said to me: but it is true that in certain associations labelled as cults there can, of course, also be dérives sectaires — of course, but that is entirely marginal compared with the overall problem of dérive sectaire in our society today.

There you are — those are a few reflections I wanted to give you. I would have one last one, perhaps, if we want to set the context beyond the national level. Today — I was speaking to you of the European Court of Human Rights — I was led to defend, notably, Erbakan and the Refah Partisi party, which had been overthrown — which had been democratically elected and which had been overthrown because it was considered to embody sharia, whereas it was only the predecessor of Erdogan, and Erdogan was already in Erbakan’s former government and was already mayor of, I believe, Istanbul at the time. So the packaging today is a little more successful.

So, it is true that the relationship between religion and cult — we were speaking of it — is commonly found — and Monsieur Baubérot, I believe you spoke of it this morning — in the Christian-democrat parties in France.

Turkey today, which is knocking at the door of the European Union of the 27 — this time it is no longer the Europe of the 46, it is the Europe of the 27 — says: yes, we would like to come. And then they are told: yes, but what about your relationship of religion to democracy in the European manner? Is sharia compatible with democracy in the European manner?

And that brings us back to the problem of laïcité — the laïque State par excellence — since, in the same order of ideas, I had at the time defended Madame Kavakçı, I believe, who was a deputy — elected as a veiled deputy — who had been refused the right to take the oath before the parliament, and who therefore [inaudible ?] to go into exile in the United States. Simply to tell you that this problem of laïcité is a very complex problem, because those same Turkish women today in France can go veiled in our universities, in France, which is a laïque country, but cannot go veiled in a university in Turkey.

To come back to the etymology of the word cult: because indeed, at the outset, this word is not pejorative at all; it is a technical term. In the etymology, it is [inaudible ?], as you said: cut. It is the site of the rupture in relation to schisms. And it became pejorative — pejoratively connoted — at the moment, indeed, of the Protestants’ rupture with Christianity, when the word sectaire was employed, and it is from that moment onwards that it progressively took on its connotation.

And again recently, in a defamation trial at Nanterre, the judges held that to say of someone that he belongs to a cult is not defamatory in itself; what is defamatory is to say that one belongs to a dangerous cult. And that is where one sees — and I come back to the problem raised earlier by Raphaël Liogier about the problem of the norm, of the law and of the application of the law by judges — and it is true, it is regrettable that in France we do not have more legal sociology to see how the laws are applied by the magistrates on the ground.

The difficulty today is that there is no legal definition of the word cult. And so, when one refers to the report — as was just said a moment ago in your particular case, but I would have dozens of my own to mention — what are the ten criteria? Mental destabilisation; the exorbitant character of the financial demands; the induced break with the original environment; attacks on physical integrity; the indoctrination of children; more or less antisocial discourse; disturbances of public order; the importance… — yes, yes, quite right: diversion of traditional economic circuits —; the importance of judicial entanglements; and attempts to infiltrate the public authorities.

Those are the ten criteria that the parliamentary commission, in its very great intelligence, put forward in 1995 to classify the so-called dangerous cults. But you will observe that in all that there is absolutely nothing that can coincide with a legal problem, except the attack on physical integrity, which was already punishable elsewhere. So we are dealing with a problem of the implementation of norms that are no longer legal norms but social norms — that is to say, we are in relations of deviance.

So when we are in relations of deviance, we arrive at the debate of a moment ago, that is to say, between the arbitrary and the totalitarian — or the authoritarian — that is to say that at a given moment, anyone can decide anything, notably deputies, by saying: there, that is deviant. And so everyone can, at a given moment… the homosexuals, who were indeed interned at Dachau, the Jews, the Gypsies, the Jehovah’s Witnesses — all those people, at a given moment, are deviant, and so they will be purely and simply eliminated, after having been put on file. And that is where — filing is dangerous — because before the elimination, we are in movements of filing, and as [inaudible ?], that is to say the problem of the treatment of the heretics — that is to say that, purely and simply, it is the functioning of the scapegoat: it will be loaded with every evil, and thanks to that, the system will survive by finding successive scapegoats.

Two small remarks on the training of judges and lawyers in France at present. The human sciences — legal sociology — have, overall, completely deserted the law faculties. In my day, we had philosophy of law, we had sociology of law, history of law; today, we train technicians of the law, and that is all. That is to say, the judges who come out of the École de la magistrature — and Judge Burgaud is not an isolated example; it is what happens commonly — are sometimes technicians of the law, but who have no capacity for discernment, no intelligence in which they would have other grids of analysis, notably with regard to sociology, to polemology — that is, the management of conflicts — in short, everything that is learned elsewhere, psychology, in faculties other than the law faculties.

And one last remark, to console you: I believe that in France, indeed, the expert — and this is where Madame Katz — what she writes is interesting, but it is not specific to the problem of the cults — overall, in France, we are in a system where one must be an expert appointed by the court in order to have legitimacy. And so in France we confuse legitimacy and competence, whereas in the Anglo-Saxon countries, in a much more pragmatic way, each of the parties can appoint its own expert, and there will be an adversarial debate, even if they are not on a list of experts. That is to say: what will be judged is the competence of the person who is going to speak, and not his legitimacy.

What are we talking about, in the About-Picard law, with psychological subjection (sujétion psychologique)? What is it? It is by definition anything but a legal entity; it is a psychological notion, by its very definition. So how do you expect a magistrate trained only in legal techniques, as is currently the case, to grasp a notion as complex as psychological subjection — which, moreover, has great difficulty gaining acceptance. We have seen the Lyon ruling, Saint-Étienne; the Court of Cassation does not rule on it. And fortunately we escaped the notion of mental manipulation, which was initially in the works, because it was realised that it could not go through, that it was impossible to apply. But it is no less true, in what was being explained earlier, in what I was telling you about moral harassment: these are only definitions — it is nothing but psychological conceptualisation.

So it is obvious that today the magistrates must — in any case those who are family-affairs judges, because there is no need to go over it again, but divorce, obviously: this problem of the cult is recurrently instrumentalised in a perverse way at every turn — the family-affairs judges, the children’s judges, a certain number of magistrates who are confronted with these problems should without fail be trained so as to have the capacity for discernment that they do not have at present — that they absolutely do not have at present.

The second point: what is to be done? Well, personally, I took part, when I was a young lawyer — in 1972 the first law in France against racism as such had just been passed — and I remember, at the time I was an activist in the Ligue des droits de l’homme, and how we had it formally recorded, in a certain number of restaurants in Strasbourg, how foreigners, because their skin was coloured, were quite simply refused a drink. It took — it was not the public prosecutor’s office that prosecuted, but the associations fighting racism, because that was in the law — which progressively set this fight against racism in motion. So there is a first discrimination which, fortunately, has today after all receded a little, even if there remains an enormous amount to do, obviously.

The second great struggle there has been, it seems to me, over the last 20 years, at the level of discrimination, was the struggle set in motion by homosexuals. It was an extraordinary undertaking — when one thinks of the situation that existed 30 years ago — and today, all the same, there has been considerable progress, and it has constituted itself as a lobby that no one, obviously, would any longer dare to go against.

So today, our fight, I would say, is the same. I met Pastor [inaudible ?] some time ago on this subject, because we were saying: at bottom, fundamentally, what is it? It is a discrimination, inscribed as such — indeed in the Constitution, already in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man — and in the declaration of human rights applicable today. So should we not — although there, obviously, if we cannot even agree at the level of a single field — but should we not think about contextualising the whole set of discriminations, to say: in the end, it is the same thing, it is not a different debate? Historically, as I lived it — at any rate, that is how I feel it today.