Sixty-six parliamentarians challenge Emmanuel Macron to bring Gisèle Halimi into the Pantheon. Who do they make fun of? The lawyer is the figure of three main struggles: the defense of FLN activists during the Algerian War, the right to abortion and, finally, the fact that rape is judged as a crime.
Now is a question of constitutionalizing the right to abortion, but what do we do with rape? If he has always been considered a crime within the meaning of the law, the judicial institution disqualified it in crime, that of “violence” in the 1970s then “sexual assault” in the more recent period.
Why? Because the courses of convenience competent to judge the crimes, made up of professional judges and jurors-citizens, cost too much and that the rapes are too numerous, they clutter society as much as justice. For lack of means – which is nothing other than a political choice -, the waiting times for a trial at the assizes have become unreasonable and the judges offer women the “correctionalization” of their “affair”, They erase penetration, and the crime turns into a simple attack.
rape will no longer be judged by an assize court
Women often accept, consent constrained by the will that the trial is held within a period which still makes sense. I remember the gaze of Gisèle Halimi on me, amazed and who challenged me when I told her that the one we defended accepted: “But Laure, what do you do? I fought all my life so that rape is judged as a crime. “
From January 2023, under the benevolent gaze of parliamentarians who claim to pantheonize the lawyer, no more rape will be judged by an assize court, too expensive for this crime in which we ultimately invest in spite of the noise that We surround it. And the question of the lawyer in the pantheon is nothing other than noise to hide the forest.
To silence everyone, and first of all women, the legislator has decided to dispense with jurors, who have been sitting since the French Revolution, and to create, for punished crimes of less than twenty years of imprisonment – These are 90 % of rapes – a special jurisdiction: the criminal court, composed of five professional judges only.
Exit jurors. Exit the public look, the outside eye, the witnesses. Exit the orality of debates and citizen pedagogy. Too expensive for rape. The “most serious” crimes, according to the expression of the former Keeper of the Seals, punished by more than twenty years’ imprisonment, will remain judged by an assize court and its direct democracy, while the rapes will be , disqualified automatically. At least we will no longer ask women their consent.
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