What will the Constitutional Council decide? This Friday, April 14, the nine Sages deliver their verdict on the pension reform and the left’s shared initiative referendum (RIP), after three months of social tensions. Will they opt for a partial censorship, the most likely option, a total censorship of the text or the double solution of not censoring the whole of the reform but to validate the procedure of referendum of shared initiative (RIP) ?
If there were to be censorship by the Constitutional Council, it would not be the first time that the body has ruled unfavorably on important texts. Created in 1958, it has already partially censored 352 laws, in addition to the 17 which have been entirely retorted, according to the count of La Croix. Here are some examples.
In December 2009, the Constitutional Council, seized by the Socialist parliamentarians, canceled the carbon tax against global warming, the flagship measure of the Sarkozy government’s 2010 budget, which was to come into force on January 1. The law aimed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by taxing the energy consumption of households and businesses, with compensation for individuals.
But the Council considered that the law created too many exemptions: “Less than half of the greenhouse gas emissions would have been subject to the carbon contribution. The objective of “putting in place instruments to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions” could therefore not be achieved, the Elders had estimated.
The UMP and centrist opposition in the Senate had seized, on October 10, the Constitutional Council about the bill on social housing, presented by the Minister of Housing, Cécile Duflot, in order to defend its “vision of a legislative procedure respectful of Parliament” and to protest against accelerated procedures for the examination of texts. The bill on social housing provided for the sale at low cost, or even free, of public land and to increase the minimum rate of social housing in municipalities.
“The Constitutional Council found that the law referred was adopted according to a procedure contrary to the Constitution. He therefore declared it, as a whole, unconstitutional,” the institution said.
In the midst of the Covid-19 epidemic, the Constitutional Council had validated, in May 2020, the law extending until July 10 the state of health emergency and organizing deconfinement. The institution had, however, censored elements related to the isolation of patients and the “tracing” of their contacts in order to limit the people who can access this data and so that a judge of freedoms can carry out a “control” if the patient had to remain isolated for more than twelve hours.
With regard to quarantine and isolation measures, the Elders considered as “custodial measures” those consisting of “complete isolation, which implies a prohibition of ‘any exit'”, and those which impose “on the ‘interested in staying at their home or in their place of accommodation for a time slot of more than twelve hours a day’.
