The deputies adopted on Monday a transpartisan bill aimed at limiting neighborhood conflicts, in particular in order to avoid the multiplication of complaints from neo-rural residents against farmers. The text, carried by the Renaissance MP for Morbihan Nicole Le Peih and which includes a single article, introduces into the Civil Code the principle of liability based on “abnormal neighborhood disturbances” while attaching it to an exception. Complaints filed for abnormal neighborhood disturbance have until now been left to the free discretion of judges, even if these conflicts have been the subject of extensive case law over the years.
The article submitted to the vote of the deputies stipulates that any “owner, tenant (…) causing a disturbance exceeding the normal neighborhood inconveniences, is automatically responsible for the resulting damage”. But it also introduces an exception which releases the author from all responsibility when this disorder comes from “pre-existing activities” at the installation of the injured person. The deputies defined these activities as having to be “in accordance with the laws and regulations” and to have “continued under the same conditions or under new conditions” without being “at the origin of the aggravation of the abnormal disorder”.
The affair of the rooster Maurice
The text recalls the affair of the rooster Maurice on the island of Oléron in New Aquitaine, accused by his neighbors of crowing too early. In 2019, the courts ruled in favor of its owner by rejecting the neighbors’ complaint, a neighborhood quarrel that had become the symbol of tensions between the local population and new arrivals in the countryside. Including the definition of abnormal neighborhood disturbance in the law will “make the law more readable and more accessible to all our fellow citizens,” Nicole Le Peih, herself from the agricultural world, told AFP.
“It is also the way to guarantee uniform application across the entire national territory,” she continued, while emphasizing that the liability exemption clause “does not, however, give a blank check to those responsible for abnormal disturbances in the neighborhood. In fact, if the activity does not comply with legislation or regulations, particularly in environmental matters, the person responsible will be held liable. The LFI and environmentalist deputies voted against the text, believing on the contrary that it could offer through its exceptions “a right to pollute to industrialists and large operators”, estimated the EELV deputy Sandrine Rousseau.
“How do you expect us to eat bread if we can no longer cut wheat?”
“Our objective is that environmental protection is superior” and that the text “cannot suffer from any exception, even prior history, to be able to continue to pollute because we have always polluted and no one never complained,” added LFI MP Ugo Bernalicis.
Coming to defend the text in the hemicycle, the Minister of Justice Eric Dupond-Moretti welcomed the provisions adopted, which according to him will have the effect of “dissuading newcomers from improperly launching legal proceedings which threaten the activity of many of our compatriots, particularly in rural and agricultural areas. “I sometimes have the impression that we are walking on our heads: how can we eat bread if we can no longer cut the wheat because of the noise of the harvester?” he further questioned.