Sébastien Delogu, sanctioned for his Palestinian flag in the Assembly, wants to refer the matter to the ECHR

POLITICS – The fight within the fight. Sébastien Delogu, sanctioned for having brandished a Palestinian flag in the hemicycle, announced that he wanted to refer the matter to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). According to information from HuffPost, The referral is currently being drafted and is based on the violation of Articles 10 and 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights relating to freedom of expression and lack of recourse.

President Yaël Braun-Pivet suspended last Tuesday’s question session with the government due to ” uproar » provoked by the gesture of the rebel during questions to the government on Tuesday May 28. The office, meeting urgently at the same time, decided to sanction him by censorship with temporary exclusion, validated by a vote of the deputies in the hemicycle.

“ My sanction for having brandished the flag of a colonized and massacred people is worthy of an authoritarian regime. The voices of peace are subject to bans, summons and violence from a dying power. I refer the matter to the ECHR. The France of the accomplices of the genocide is not ours! », Wrote the MP (LFI) for Bouches-du-Rhône on social networks this Thursday, May 30.

This is the most severe sanction, which has been unanimously criticized on the left, but not only. The majority deputy Naïma Moutchou, vice-president of the Horizons group, judged in Le Figaro that simple censorship would have been more appropriate.

According to article 73 of the Assembly’s regulations, that decided on Tuesday provides for the “rights the deprivation, for two months, of half of the parliamentary allowance allocated to the deputy” and “results in the ban on taking part in the work of the Assembly and reappearing in the Palace of the Assembly until the expiration of the fifteenth day of sitting following that on which the sentence was pronounced.”

Three procedures already underway

“ The reasons are the violation of freedom of expression and the absence of an effective remedy since nothing can be done in the face of such a disproportionate and arbitrary sanction », explained to HuffPost a Source at the LFI group. She cites articles 10 and 13; the first concerns freedom of expression while the second guarantees “right to an effective remedy”.

This is not the first time that rebels have denounced the sanctions imposed on them. “ We have three procedures already underway, said this Sourceagainst the sanction of Thomas Portes, against the fact of having been sanctioned for having broadcast live on Twitter the proceedings of the joint committee of the retirement law, against the fact of having been collectively sanctioned for the signs “no to retirement at 64” in the hemicycle. » According to our information, the ECHR is still studying the admissibility of such actions.

The president of the LFI group in the Assembly had at that time denounced on the authoritarian excesses of the government » during the debates on pension reform. In a letter to Yaël Braun-Pivet, Mathilde Panot then cited a decision of the international court dating from 2016: “The ECHR ruled in 2016 that Article 10 paragraph 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights, relating to freedom of expression, had been violated by the President of the Hungarian Assembly by sanctioning four deputies for having held up signs.”

The LFI group, citing calculations of Mediapart, recalls that under the presidency of Yaël Braun-Pivet, there were more sanctions than during the entire Fifth Republic.

Enough to raise the question of the inadequacy of the sanctions system. Several deputies plan to review the scale of sanctions, according to Opinion. Parliamentarians are calling for a broader range of sanctions to allow for a gradation, because there are currently only four types of sanctions. “ An observation shared by Yaël Braun-Pivet », writes the newspaper, specifying that she would have asked the group presidents to make proposals.

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