Inequalities, police, public services: the warnings of the Defender of Rights

Defender of rights for six years, after a long political career, Jacques Toubon transformed the independent authority he chairs into the Court of Moral Accounts. The coronavirus crisis and the containment it triggered gave him a new opportunity to take his pilgrim stick to denounce the inequalities that are undermining France.

"Social and territorial inequalities, the setbacks in public services already at work have been exacerbated" with the epidemic, estimates with AFP Jacques Toubon, who is preparing to leave the independent authority after six years at his head. He hopes that after making inequalities “even more glaring”, the “health crisis […] will lead to better access to rights”.

Before that, the year 2019 was marked by social protest and the demonstrations of the Yellow Vests. During this period, files linked to “security ethics”, the majority of which concerned the action of the police, jumped 29%.

He calls for "awareness of the authorities"

Out of some 2,000 complaints received, the Defender of Rights concluded that the agents had “failed” in only 10.7% of the cases. But he calls for an "awareness of the authorities": the crisis of confidence in the security forces is deep and responding to this crisis with "warlike logic" would only aggravate the problem. Witness the recent controversy surrounding the words of Camélia Jordana, which arose the day before the death of George Floyd during a police intervention, which led to tens of thousands of demonstrators wanting to be heard in many countries.

Faced with new accusations of racism within the police, the former Chiraquian minister relaunches the idea of ​​"traceability of identity checks". "Transparency is possible and it is for the benefit of both those who are checked and the police," he pleads with AFP.

His last report was to be devoted to 2019, Toubon stretched it to confinement. If the Defender of Rights had to reduce his activity by half, he was asked to reopen post offices, asylum application counters, unclog prisons, or adapt the exit certificate to people with disabilities.

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The state of health emergency, which considerably restricted the freedom of movement and organized a tracing of the patients, was put in place "with discernment" to fight against the pandemic, he estimates. But he insisted on the necessarily "temporary" nature of these measures. In 2017, the Defender of Rights had warned against the transposition into the law, on a perennial basis, of certain measures of the state of emergency decreed after the attacks of 2015.

The recent health crisis shows, according to him, "a certain indifference" of the French "to the restrictions that have been made on rights and freedoms: freedom to come and go, privacy, medical confidentiality ..." Or state of health emergency is "compatible with the rule of law" only if it remains "temporary", he recalls.

A France "at a crossroads"

In 2019, the independent authority received 103,000 complaints. It is 7.5% more than the previous year. Since the arrival of Jacques Toubon, who wanted to highlight the institution, requests have increased by 40.3%.

This annual report depicts a France "at a crossroads", undermined by "territorial inequalities", but also by the "feeling of abandonment" caused by "the digital divide and the dematerialization with forced march" of public services, including he denounces the decline for several years. Lack of means, they have "increasing difficulties in responding to requests addressed to them". Striking example with justice, often unable to inform victims within a reasonable time of decisions taken after their complaints. In 2019, the Defender of Rights "seized more than 600 times the public prosecutors on this subject".

Aged 78, Jacques Toubon will step down in July. During his appointment by François Hollande in 2014, part of the left was concerned about the choice of Baron RPR, who had refused to vote for the entire law abolishing the death penalty in the 1980s and had opposed the PACS for homosexuals. "The position of freedom and independence is a position that I had never known until now", justifies today the former Keeper of the Seals and ex-Minister of Culture. In six years in office, the Defender of Rights has argued in favor of PMA for all women, defended the ban on spanking, pointed out facial checks, the destitution of migrant camps, the problems of schooling for Roma children , the unwelcome reception of foreign minors. In January 2018, ten months before the start of the Yellow Vests protests, the institution had called for a ban on defense ball launchers (LBD) and advocated a recasting of the doctrine of policing.