A-Infos (en) France, OCL: FROM THE DEATH PENALTY TO DEATH PENALTY - Badinter or the falsifier of history. (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

A national tribute is paid to Robert Badinter, Emmanuel Macron brings 
the former Minister of Justice into the Pantheon. "This establishes as a 
model a statesman who, by abolishing the death penalty against the 
majority opinion of the time, inaugurated a new type of democracy" as Le 
Figaro puts it. The subterfuge always works! ---- At the time, France 
prided itself on being the flagship country of democratic values, on 
being the country of human rights. In a common spirit, our leaders, our 
sociologists, our criminologists, our philosophers, our intellectuals, 
our artists celebrate the political courage shown by the first 
Mitterrand government and its justice minister. Nice sleight of hand! We 
simply forget to say that France was one of the last countries in 
Western Europe to make this decision; Spain had already abolished it in 
1978 and Portugal in 1975.

France was obliged to break with this barbaric practice to build the 
European judicial area. As early as 1978, the Giscard-Barre government 
prepared a legal-prison arsenal, capable of replacing the guillotine 
more effectively and cleanly. In fact, in 1981, the socialists did not 
abolish the death penalty but just did away with the guillotine and 
replaced the death penalty with imprisonment until death, not to mention 
summary executions in the streets by the guarantors of republican order.

In 1978, the date of creation of security penalties, right and left 
combined, carried by the construction of Europe, reform after reform 
hardened the Penal Code and its application. It was, among others, under 
the presidency of Badinter that jurists designed the new Penal Code of 
1994. The guillotine, which had decapitated 19 people between 1958 and 
1981, was replaced by security sentences until death with a whole system 
of non-confusion, multiplication of aggravating circumstances, 
disappearance of mitigating circumstances, reductions in sentence 
reductions... which constitute an efficient, clean and respectful of 
human rights substitute for the death penalty. The number of prisoners 
over 60 in prison has tripled in less than ten years; there is a death 
every three days in detention, there have never been so many life 
sentences and people suffering from serious mental disorders incarcerated.

Has death left the world of punishment? No! Today's prisons are death 
halls where sentences are inexorably lengthened and forms of 
incarceration multiply: "prison-hospital", "prison-asylum", 
"prison-hospice", reinforced security unit, prison for minors. .. where 
despair lurks with its procession of suicides, self-mutilation, madness, 
slow death, violence.

"The abolition of capital punishment banally inaugurated the great 
transformation of the penal State and its kingdom of damnations. In 
October 1981, there were 31,551 prisoners, there were more than 50,000 
in 2000 (75,000 in 2024). We pile up. We are building, in an emergency, 
cities of punishment like yesterday they were building the bars of the 
outskirts. They are preparing new reformatories for children, 
specialized prisons for bedridden prisoners, others for the mentally ill 
(nearly a third of the penal population suffers from serious mental 
disorders), high security prisons for dangerous prisoners... In twenty 
years, the average length of sentences has increased by 71%. As for the 
increase in the sentences handed down, it can no longer be contested, 
not to mention the establishment of security sentences, eighteen, 
twenty-two then thirty years which cannot be reduced. It's the inflation 
of absurd security to the point of real perpetuity! And today thousands 
of long sentences and more than 600 life sentences are slowly 
suffocating in the new concrete and steel towers of the whole prison. 
This is the reality of the prison explosion! And it is also a war of 
words that the media worshipers sing at the top of their lungs.»
[A prisoner]

So no! Badinter had no courage. His character is only a fiction for the 
right-thinking. An illusion of democratic support for the assassins of 
democracy.

Nadia M

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4097
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