Centrist Senator Nathalie Goulet has tabled a bill to protect the press, after the revelations of the director of the publication of Mediapart, Edwy Plenel, who affirmed Monday that justice had prevented the investigation site from publishing information taken from an audio recording.
The article targeted by this procedure concerns the sextape blackmail case, involving the mayor (LR) of Saint-Étienne, Gaël Perdriau.
“We cannot leave the situation as it is and not protect the press more,” declared the president of the Culture Commission Laurent Lafon (centrist) on Tuesday.
This order of the Paris court, issued urgently on Friday, November 18, “calls into question one of the fundamental freedoms, the freedom of the press”, he estimated.
"It was important to react quickly and to express our support for the press," added Laurent Lafon.
Read alsoSextape blackmail: the mayor of Saint-Etienne, on the defensive, evokes a “terrible plot”
The article submitted on Tuesday therefore aims to complete the law of July 29, 1881 on the freedom of the press, by adding that "a publication can only be prohibited in application of a judicial decision rendered contradictorily".
“It's the non-contradictory aspect that smashes press law (…) it amounts to censoring a priori,” explained Nathalie Goulet.
According to the senator, a lawyer by profession, the order on request is a “classic, urgent” procedure, but used “in a totally unprecedented way in the press”.
“Against fundamental rights”
For its part, the group CRCE with a communist majority estimated in a press release that “the contradictory and the right to a fair trial were not respected with regard to Mediapart”.
"Every bit of this decision clearly goes against fundamental rights and opens the way to a new condemnation of France by the European Court of Human Rights", according to the group.
“Without judging the substance which belongs to justice, the decision (…) fundamentally raises questions”, reacted in a joint press release the deputies of Nupes.
"In a democracy and a proper rule of law, it is incomprehensible that pre-publication and non-adversarial censorship procedures can be used against the press," they said.
The investigative media had denounced Monday an "unprecedented prior censorship".
"Mediapart was not informed of this procedure and the order was taken by a judge without our newspaper being able to defend its work and its rights", indicated the director of the publication Edwy Plenel.
The ordinance injunction not to publish "new revelations on the political practices of the mayor of Saint-Étienne, based in particular on the same recordings which allowed us to reveal the scandal of blackmail to the sextape of which his first deputy was the victim centrist Gilles Artigues, ”he said.