The Senate on Thursday rejected a bill aimed at banning bullfighting for minors under the age of sixteen. Both camps are already sharpening their arguments for a future contest.
The bill proposed by centrist senator Samantha Cazebonne, co-signed by around forty elected officials from several groups, and aimed at banning “bullfighting and cockfighting in the presence of minors under sixteen years of age”, while pursuing the objective of “protect minors from exposure to violence”was finally rejected by a very large majority of senators this Thursday, after having been discussed by parliamentarians.
Expected outcome
An outcome that is anything but surprising, given the balance of power in the hemicycle of the upper house, and as had already been suggested by a first rejection in the law committee, a week earlier.
Once the verdict was rendered, political reactions did not fail to flourish and prolong the debate beyond the moment of the vote: outraged in the camp of elected anti-corrida officials, relieved and satisfied in that of the defenders of tradition, at first among whom we found in particular the deputies of Gard and Hérault Laurent Burgoa and Jean-Pierre Grand, very active in this fight.
Anti-corridas disappointed
“After three hours of debate, the two articles making up the text were deleted. The bill, emptied of its substance, was not voted on” noted, saddened, the Nîmes resident Claire Starozinski, president of the Anti-Corrida Alliance, who was, she recalled on Thursday, “the only NGO to have been heard by the Law Commission” on this subject.
“Once again, France has missed the opportunity to comply with the recommendations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child, which explicitly recommended prohibiting minors' access to bullfighting or related shows. the best interests of the child, he was sacrificed on the altar of traditions, denial and opportunism…” she also lamented.
To be continued…
And now ? “In the National Assembly, people are ready to follow us, but it is so fluctuating, with perhaps a dissolution looming… In the Senate, on the other hand, we could re-submit the same bill, by another group of parliamentarians, taking up all the points that were opposed to us. It's in the pipeline. indicated this Monday Claire Starozinski to Free Midday.
“We are refining our arguments in anticipation of a new initiative” anti-bullfighting associations or elected officials echoed André Viard, president of the Bullfighting Cultures Observatory. Who, also this Monday, appreciated the fact that “all our arguments on the legal level, on family law and community law in particular, hit the mark on Thursday in the Senate”.
The union of French bullfighting towns mobilized
As for the Union of French bullfighting towns, also very mobilized against this bill, it had, last Thursday, welcomed the vote of the senators in these terms: “By considering that only parents have the right to include or not the bullfighting culture in the education of their children and that only mayors have the right to regulate the practice of bullfighting, the Senate has taken an important step on the path of the definitive protection of bullfighting in France”.
And saying to himself “grateful to the senators who have strengthened the rights of the bullfighting cultural community”the UVTF was also planning on the next inevitable deadlines, ensuring that it “will continue its action in this direction”.
