Heightened sanctions, easier functional protection… Parliament definitively adopted on Thursday, after a final vote by the Senate, a text aimed at better protecting local elected officials faced with violence. The senators unanimously adopted this bill, putting an end to the legislative process of this transpartisan text which aroused the same consensus in the National Assembly despite the abstention of the Insoumis on Tuesday.
“Elected officials are confronted a little more every day with the growing violence in our society. They are on the front line and the feeling of impunity only leads to exhaustion (…) This renunciation, this disillusionment, we let’s fight” with this text, was satisfied the Minister of Territorial Communities, Dominique Faure.
The memory of several episodes accompanied the examination of this text, such as the arson of the home of the mayor of Saint-Brévin-les-Pins (Loire-Atlantique) and the car-ramming attack on the home of that of L’Haÿ-les-Roses (Val-de-Marne), which made an impression last year.
Heightened sanctions and easier functional protection
One of the key measures is the alignment of the sanctions provided for, in the event of violence against local elected officials, with those provided for violence against holders of public authority, such as the police. The text also creates a community service penalty in the event of public insults against persons holding public authority and local elected officials, a measure extended to insults and defamation.
It also provides for the automatic granting of “functional protection” to mayors and municipal elected officials with an executive mandate, when they are victims of attacks or insults. On the other hand, a controversial measure, which aimed to extend the limitation periods from three months to one year in the event of public insult and defamation against elected officials, was finally removed from the text during negotiations with deputies, to the great regret of the senators.
“We would have liked to go further to meet expectations,” admitted Mathieu Darnaud (Les Républicains), inviting the government to “work more concretely on the repeated and daily attacks of which elected officials are victims, particularly on social networks”.
In recent months, the government has taken up the issue of local commitment through two aspects: that of security, which ends here, and that of the “status of local elected officials”, which is the subject of several parliamentary initiatives currently under consideration in both chambers.