France faces a constitutional CRISIS AS President Sarkozy moves to cut back powers of key governance institutions.
Firstly, parliament. Concerns turned to uproar when the Sarkozy majority attempted to gain control of speaking time in the house.
For the first time in 47 years, the Opposition members stood and sang the national anthem La Marseillaise as a mark of protest.
Socialists stormed out, boycotting a vote by the conservatives in power to guillotine debate in the assembly.
Secondly, the media. Sarkozy breezily dismisses an independent committee taking over the powers to hire and fire the head of the state broadcasting services. He also declares an end to advertising on five state TV channels, famous for exposing corruption across the political spectrum.
Public broadcasters fear a half billion euro loss in income and thus independence.
Case in point? A documentary on state TV linking the disapperance of an investigative journalist in French Polynesia with allegations of assassination by state spies. State radio followed up exposes of multimillion-dollar corruption involving a former French president and an account in Japan.
Finally, justice. Rounding out claims of a three-point attack on democracy, Sarkozy walks into the Supreme Court and declares plans to end investigatory powers of examining magistrates.
Often-feared, examining magistrates who go back to the early 1800s, are also infamous for exposing corruption.
“It’s the death of an independent judicial system,” says Emmanuelle Perreux, head of the judges union. Investigatory powers are to go to the police, requiring judges to follow a more impartial role, closer to English systems.
Sarkozy hails the change as a “victory” as it returns “power” to the people of France, highlighting recent mistakes by judges in two high profile cases. Critics say governance seawalls like parliamentary time, independence of the state media, and the entire French legal system may be under threat of political interference.
Justice Minister Jachida Dati already has power to appoint—and dismiss—prosecutors, giving the Sarkozy administration direct control of police investigations.
Dati has spent months in power disbanding more than 300 different tribunals.
Another amendment restricts some 600 examining magistrates to only the most serious of 36,000 cases. Increasing suspicion keeps falling upon endless scandals and affairs surrounding the key institutions in France.
Suspect number one: former French president, Jacques Chirac, former leader of a one-time support group for “barbouzes”—a French version of what the CIA today calls “black-ops”.
Suspect number two: former French Polynesian president Gaston Flosse, said to have facilitated payment of millions to Chirac from civil and military projects surrounding three decades of nuclear test programmes.
Suspect number three, critics claim, is clearing house Clearstream. Thousands of secret accounts are reported hidden inside Clearstream, for leading banks, companies, politicians and businesspeople around the globe.
Clearstream first came to public attention in 2001, with an expose of some 1.5 trillion euro in “false assets”.
Still unanswered, issues raised by leading judges in a full page newspaper ad in Le Monde, describing Clearstream as “the black box” of a worldwide “fiscal paradise” system, known variously in English as tax havens, asset havens, offshore banking and finance centres.
Behind the headlines? Two major inquiries headed by three examining magistrates threaten to spin out of control. One examining magistrate order looks into the 1997 disappearance of Jean-Pascal Couraud, a former investigative journalist in French Polynesia. Searches are ordered on Paris offices of DGSE, the French CIA.
A surprise search turns up a letter of testimony at the apartment of Gaston Flosse, now one of two senators for French Polynesia, also in Paris. Attributed to one of four agents accused of assassinating Couraud, the agent was found dead in a shallow valley creek, with January 2004 inquest records showing “troubling” signs of heavy blows to the head.
Undergoing handwriting analysis, the letter mirrors court testimony from another agent in late 2004. He overheard colleagues drunkenly boasting about abducting and beating Couraud, known as “JPK”.
Bundling him aboard a boat, four agents took Couraud out into the open ocean, roping and chaining JPK to four concrete blocks. JPK eventually passed out unconscious from torture and his body was tossed over into waters more than 2000 metres deep.