“Stunning, disastrous and really very worrying”, reacts the Human Rights League

Patrick Beaudouin, president of the League for Human Rights, reacted on franceinfo on Monday after the Minister of the Interior’s comments on the rule of law.

It is “staggering, disastrous and truly very worrying”, reacts Monday September 30 on franceinfo Patrick Beaudouin, president of the Human Rights League (LDH), after Bruno Retailleau’s remarks on the rule of law. The new Minister of the Interior believes that the rule of law is not “not intangible, nor sacred” and that “it is a set of rules, a hierarchy of norms, judicial control, a separation of powers, but [que] the source of the rule of law is democracy, it is the sovereign people.”

“The questioning of the notion of the rule of law is what shocks me the most”affirms the president of the LDH, “because the rule of law is what characterizes democratic regimes, as opposed to authoritarian regimes now called ultraliberal, it is even what distinguishes it from dictatorship, since dictatorship is the rejection of the rule of law”. According to him, “this is what distinguishes a dictatorship from a State which respects the laws, which respects the rights of the citizens it protects and which guarantees the notions of equality, liberty and fraternity”. “It is an absolutely essential foundation if we want to stay in a country which corresponds precisely to everything these values ​​are.“, he insists.

The Minister of the Interior also made harsh remarks on immigration, saying he was in favor of a referendum or the reinstatement of double jeopardy. “There is no question of saying that we do not need a certain level of immigration control”concedes Patrick Beaudoin, “but making such divisive remarks, saying that immigration is not an opportunity, calling into question the rule of law in a context where our society is already under permanent tension, is extremely dangerous and it does not is of no use”, he judges. “Let us try to see the existing problems lucidly and resolve them, not by anathemas and cookie-cutter and demagogic formulas but by real reasoning”, he pleads.

According to the president of the LDH, “Bruno Retailleau’s speech is, neither more nor less, than the speech of the RN”, emphasizing that the party executives of Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen have left “congratulated very quickly”. Bruno Retailleau “really fits into this logic of the extreme right which can only lead to the worst.”