The Senate voted on Monday, May 12 to withdraw from the associations present in the Administrative Detention Centers (CRA) their legal advice to foreigners held for their expulsion, a device strongly supported by Bruno Retailleau and criticized to the left.
“It is time to say that it is not the associations that define state policy,” according to Senator Les Républicins Marie-Carole Cuntu, who did not hide their intentions when presenting a bill before the upper chamber.
His text, adopted in 227 votes to 113, aims to discard the associations of the CRA to trust “the role of information about access to the Law of Foreigners” to the Office of French Imigration and Integration (OFII), an organization under the supervision of the Ministry of Interior.
Five associations in the elimination viewer
Currently, five associations, including Cimade, France Terre D’Asille or even forum refugees, are mandatory by the State in the framework of a public market to intervene in CRA, where they accompany the selected persons by granting them legal information and assistance.
But the latter, according to Bruno Retailleau, “ruled its missions and actually returned them against the State by hindering its action for pure activism,” he hit the Interior Minister, arguing “strongly” this text of his former colleagues in the Law of the Senate.
The senatorial majority, a right center alliance, also considers that the current organization leads to “systematization” and a “massification” of controversial appeals.
The transfer of this competition to the OFII, on the one hand, to inform the selected foreigners, and in a second step to the legal assistance lawyers would also offer more “impartial”, and would lead to savings for the State, quantified at 6.5 million euros by Bruno Retailleau.
“A real regression, an organized and assumed decline”
The whole left, and a handful of centrist, opposed the text during the quite animated debates, for fear of an infraction “to the fundamental principles of law” and freedom of association.
The communist senator Ian Brossat denounced “a real regression, a decline organized and assumed in the law of people locked up to have independent, neutral and effective legal information.”
The associations concerned about this text are also a permanent wind: in a tribune in the world published on Sunday, they feared “a fatal blow to the exercise of the rights of individuals of freedom and democratic transparency.”
This bill is now transmitted to the National Assembly with an “accelerated procedure” of the government activated by the Government, which could allow a faster parliamentary trip.
Source: BFM TV
