The Constitutional Council will rule on January 25 on the controversial immigration law adopted in mid-December, its president Laurent Fabius announced on Monday during the institution’s wishes to Emmanuel Macron. The Constitutional Council is not “a chamber of appeal for the choices of Parliament, it is the judge of the constitutionality of laws”, declared twice in his speech the former socialist Prime Minister, according to the text sent to the AFP.
“We must always ensure that we respect the rule of law”
“In an advanced democratic regime like ours, we can always modify the state of the law, but, to do this, we must always ensure that we respect the rule of law,” added the president of the Constitutional Council, who made the subject of four referrals after the adoption by Parliament of the text on immigration, considerably toughened by the right and voted in particular thanks to the votes of the National Rally. He was keen to provide this “clear definition” after the debates last year in Parliament on the “two very sensitive issues” of pension reform and the immigration law, deploring that his institution found itself “in the midst of contradictory and momentarily tumultuous passions.”
The year “2023 has indeed struck us, my colleagues and me, by a certain confusion among some between law and politics”, he explained, recalling that the role of the Constitutional Council is “whatever the text on which it is seized to rule in law”. To defend the “impartial office” of the institution he presides over, Laurent Fabius endorsed a declaration from his predecessor Robert Badinter who had affirmed that an “unconstitutional law is necessarily bad, but a bad law is not necessarily unconstitutional.
After the adoption of the law on immigration, the Constitutional Council was contacted by Emmanuel Macron himself, the President of the National Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet and by left-wing deputies and senators. On the pension reform, which the government adopted in March using the constitutional weapon of 49.3, Laurent Fabius recalled that the institution he chairs had certainly validated the procedure chosen for its adoption, while recalling that “six legislative horsemen” had been censored.