In November 29, 2022, during the debates on the bill aimed at protecting housing against illegal occupation, the Minister of Justice, Eric Dupont-Moretti, expressed before the National Assembly his “weariness of constantly hearing that we are the bastards who want to criminalize the poor”.
At the risk of becoming boring again, we are indeed talking about the criminalization of the poor. The penal code has two offenses of poor housing which are aimed directly at homeless people and tenants in difficulty. These offenses protect real estate, regardless of the use made of it, even disused, abandoned by their owners, large or small.
The law voted in Parliament on June 14 exposes persons occupying a residential or commercial building, even empty, without authorization to two years’ imprisonment and a fine of 30,000 euros. At the same time, the offense of home invasion is extended to vacant buildings and sees its penalties tripled. To which is added an administrative expulsion procedure in seventy-two hours, without prior control by the judge, relying entirely on the police and the prefect, on whom there is no obligation whatsoever to propose even than alternative accommodation.
Absolute precariousness
In addition, while they are by definition already overwhelmed with a rent debt, tenants who remain in their accommodation after an eviction judgment will be liable to a fine of 7,500 euros. At the same time, the eviction procedure is accelerated and the possibility for the judge to grant time limits for payment or for leaving the premises is significantly reduced.
This law penalizes, very concretely, people who are homeless, in arrears due to a life incident, or else vulnerable to the point of being forced, for lack of anything better, to take shelter in a local which is not theirs. People who do not pay their rent do not do so by choice: they go through difficulties, most often temporary, linked to the loss of a job, separation or illness. With this law, thousands of people in an absolutely precarious situation find themselves threatened with manu militari deportation, police custody, prison sentences, indelible fines, criminal records… for having tried to avoid the streets.
Some 330,000 people in France are homeless, and nearly 6 million suffer from an excessive financial effort to find housing: it is the victims of this intolerable situation that the law will punish.
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