The Senate adopted on Tuesday, May 6 for the second time, a bill that paves the way to the rehabilitation of people convicted of homosexuality in France, however, refusing to associate a compensation section, voted in the National Assembly.
The text of the socialist senator Hussein Bourgi, unanimously adopted, even if the left was judged “unsatisfactory”, he intends that France has recognized its discrimination policy against homosexual peoples between 1942 and 1982, the date of the final decriminalization of homosexuality.
Two articles of the Criminal Code of the time were directed: the first set a specific age of consent for homosexual relations and the other aggravated the repression of public indignation to modesty when it was committed by two people of the same sex.
“Reject forgetting”
According to Regis Schlagdenhaufen, professor at the School of High Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS (EHESS), they pronounced about 10,000 convictions, and around 40,000 for the reasons of public indignation with homosexual modesty, according to regis Schlagdenhauffen, professor of the Faculty of High Studies of Social Sciences (EHESS).
“Homophobia was not simply tolerated, it was legitimized, institutionalized, orchestrated. The State not only let it go, condemned and persecute (…) assuming that this responsibility is to reject oblivion,” he praised the minister delegated to the fight against discrimination, the Bergé de Aurore, favorable to the text.
In addition to this recognition of the nation, the left in the Senate could not see a financial repair mechanism for the benefit of excessively convicted persons, an allocation of 10,000 euros, accompanied by 150 euros per day of deprivation of liberty.
This measure that appeared in the initial text represents the main disagreement between the two cameras of Parliament: it was approved by the National Assembly, but does not convince the right and central groups, most in the Senate, which legally consider it imperfect and fear litigation.
Compensation disagreement
“There is no precedent in France,” said Senator Les Républicins Francis Szpiner. “The Republic must apologize for an undoubtedly discriminatory situation,” “but going beyond that seems unreasonable,” he added.
The left lamented this position. “We are not allowed to minimize, we have no right to assume when it comes to people’s dignity,” said Hussein Bourgi. “If you recognize the damage but refuse to repair it, then you have not completely recognized it,” said environmentalist Mélanie Vogel.
The Government has been the same opinion as senatorial law, Aurore Bergé ensuring that “financial compensation cannot arise in a valid manner of the direct application of a criminal law”, while evoking difficulties related to prescription.
Another divergence between the Senate and the Government, on the one hand, and the deputies, on the other hand, the period covered by this Memory Law. The Assembly wanted to begin in 1942, the Senate opted for 1945, believing that the Republic did not have to “apologize for the crimes of the Vichy regime.”
The persistent disagreement between senators and deputies will force the National Assembly to grant the bill in the second reading again before any entry into force of this text backed by associations for the defense of LGBT+people.
Source: BFM TV
