Parliamentary Reports and Their Legal Value

Parliamentary Reports and Their Legal Value

by the CICNS

There are parliamentary reports on every question. The general public is not always informed about them, although these reports can now be consulted on the Internet, in particular on the National Assembly’s website.

The campaign waged against spiritual minorities goes back to the beginning of the 1980s. The first report dates from 1983. It is known as the “Vivien report”, after the deputy who chaired it.

The famous report published in 1996 drawing up the list of 173 cults [1] concluded the first parliamentary commission of inquiry on the subject of cults in 1995 [2].

In October 1998, the Ministry of the Interior published a circular defining the means put in place to combat dérives sectaires.

In this document, addressed to all prefects, it is specified:

« These parliamentary reports constitute only an element of information and of proposal; they do not claim to have normative value and could found neither distinctions between associations described as “cult” associations and those which are not so described in the light of the said reports, nor any sanctions whatsoever. So long as an association is not the object of an administrative or judicial dissolution, it enjoys the constitutionally recognised freedoms and may carry on the activity corresponding to its object within the strict framework of the laws in force . »

This circular therefore applies to all parliamentary reports on the subject of cults.

A second parliamentary commission of inquiry on the theme “Cults and money” in 1998 led to the publication in 1999 of the report of the same name. The list of cults is completed with a few additional movements, among them the anthroposophical movement.

In March 2000, the tribunal de grande instance of Paris convicted the president of the “Cults and Money” parliamentary commission, M. Guyard, of defamation against three anthroposophical movements, following his television appearance on France 2 in June 1999 . The ground for this conviction: ” the report is not in a position to justify a serious inquiry” in support of its accusations, the documents produced were not “relevant” and “without probative value ” (in “Le Monde” of 23 March 2000). In September 2001 the Court of Appeal would recognise the defamatory character of the statements while considering M. G uyard to have acted in good faith and therefore not guilty of the offence of public defamation.

On 27 May 2005, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin published a circular relating to the fight against dérives sectaires in which it is said:

Experience has shown that an approach consisting, for the public authorities, in describing this or that grouping as a “cult” and in founding their action on that description alone would not make it possible to ensure this reconciliation effectively or to found the initiatives taken solidly in law (…) recourse to lists of groupings will be avoided in favour of the use of bundles of criteria .

It should be noted that a short time after the publication of this circular, the parliamentary study group on cults published this press release.

A third parliamentary commission of inquiry on the theme “cults and minors” took place in 2006. The corresponding report avoided drawing up lists of names while stigmatising a certain number of groups.

Today, most of the deputies active on the theme of the fight against cults, as well as governmental bodies such as the MIVILUDES, claim not to wish to have recourse to lists. Apart from the fact that these lists have already amply achieved their objective of discrediting spiritual minorities, it seems in fact that this work of drawing up lists is henceforth subcontracted to anti-cult associations such as UNADFI, recognised as being of public utility: thus the Île-de-France region subsidises this association to list dangerous persons and groups in the field of well-being and alternative medicine.

In summary, the situation is as follows: several official texts confirm the absence of normative and legal value of the reports (and of any list of the same stamp). The Raffarin circular of 2005, failing to prohibit their use, recommends not having recourse to them, but in practice these are constantly used in the courts, in administrations and local authorities and by the media, without their being legally enforceable since they are said to be merely indicative. This practice, in the French context of the fight against cults and against a background of laïcité, constitutes what Raphaël Liogier calls: “the theoretical denial of a practical behaviour” (Raphaël Liogier, “Une laïcité légitime – La France et ses religions d’État”, EntreLacs) ( see also /library/cicns/les-juges-et-les-sectes/).

The CICNS fully intends to recall this incoherent and law-disregarding reality to those who might have difficulty hearing it.

[1] The figure of 172 “cults” is the most widespread when this document is mentioned (including in our own pages), but there are in reality 173 movements listed in this report. The 173rd is that of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, entered slightly apart from the list, which led some to think that they were not associated with the rest of the list. The anti-cult campaign of the following years demonstrated that this was not so.

[2] Read also /library/cicns/paturel-2/