The intruder of the news gives each evening a spotlight on a personality who could have passed under the radars of the news.
The Constitutional Council has been seized four times on this pension text: by the Prime Minister, to defend her law, but also by Nupes deputies, RN deputies and left-wing senators, which is perhaps the most interesting referral. since the text was examined and voted on in the Senate, whereas the assembly stopped at article 2 and did not vote. For the senators on the left, it is therefore a fairly well-known professor of constitutional law who wrote the argument, Jean-Philippe Derosier. He agrees to reveal it here.
>> Who are the nine Elders of the Constitutional Council who will decide on the pension reform?
Jean-Philippe Derosier, many know him as a constitutionalist. He is 43 years old and bathed in politics with a father and a mother who met at the PS congress in Metz in 1979. The father was already a deputy at the time, Bernard Derosier, who then chaired the general council of the North for 20 years (until 2011). Her mother, of German origin, was an activist and later worked in advertising. The right ? He went there without too much conviction at the start, after the baccalaureate. He had dreamed of being an architect, but lacked his mother’s drawing talent.
Stay in the shadows
AT Nanterre, in double deug right and German, he has a revelation! “I found myself for my very first class at law school, in Guy Carcassonne’s amphitheater, remembers Jean-Philippe Derosier. So I’ve always had a certain attraction for rules, for precise things, a mathematical side, to which the Law responds. And then Guy Carcassonne was an outstanding pedagogue, connoisseur of the finest constitutional law, a model for the entire university community.”
“I said to myself that passing on, making future citizens, helping to do so had something exciting about it. And I had this attraction that continues today.”
Jean-Philippe Derosier, juristat franceinfo
It should be noted that Guy Carcassonne will also write the referrals of the Socialist deputies for the Constitutional Council and will be an adviser to the cabinet of Michel Rocard, like Jean-Philippe Derosier will be his father’s parliamentary assistant for a few years. He is close to François Hollande but has never really advised him. He has his PS card but has never been a candidate himself. For him, in politics, “there are those who decide and those who tell those who decide what they must decide”. And he prefers the second category…
On pensions, concretely, he wrote about 20 pages to detail the points of constitutional law which, according to him, justify invalidating this law, in particular the accumulation of procedural levers in the Senate. Same thing for the RIP, the popular initiative referendum. But his name does not appear: it is the politicians who sign the referral. He also briefed and accompanied Patrick Kanner, the president of the PS group and the communist and ecologist presidents on the day of their hearing before the Elders, who moreover came all nine, usually there are two or three of them, a sign of the importance that the Council attaches to this debate.
Who writes the argument: the lawyer or the activist?
Since 2018, Jean-Philippe Derosier has drafted around twenty referrals. In 2019, they thus had a good part of the anti-thug law and the programming law for justice censored, drone surveillance, surveillance in police custody cells, in particular even if, afterwards, the article, it is important, can be rewritten and validated with additional guarantees, for example in the case of police custody.
>> Pension reform: “There are questions about the legislative vehicle borrowed” by the government, says Jean-Philippe Derosier
Having his card at the PS, some necessarily ask themselves the question of whether it is the lawyer or the activist who writes the argument. This is the same question that some are asking about the political independence of the Constitutional Council itself. Will he make a political or legal decision? So jurist or activist? “It’s the lawyer, it’s always the lawyer and it’s only the lawyer, replies Jean-Philippe Derosier. I have always had the conviction, but also the rigor, of reasoning in law, independently of my political convictions. For example, there was indeed this referendum initiative on superprofits which, politically, could be perfectly justified. But I considered that the referendum initiative in article eleven of the Constitution did not allow such a bill to be made and therefore not to intervene in the service of socialist senators before the Constitutional Council.
Obviously, the lawyer does not spend all his time on these referrals. He is also a university professor in Lille, and a researcher who reflects on the constitution of the Fifth Republic which will celebrate its 65th anniversary. He has just founded a group of jurists (the GRECI) which is reflecting on the way, for example, to strengthen the role of Parliament by giving it exclusive rights to the agenda. His prediction for Friday? He refuses to give it upstream, but he obviously hopes that his arguments will be heard.