France’s Permanent Emergency State

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/25/opinion/frances-permanent-emergency-state.html

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Shortly after Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel killed 84 people by driving a truck through the crowd gathered on Nice’s seafront, France’s president, François Hollande, announced he would ask Parliament to extend for another three months the state of emergency declared immediately after the Paris terrorist attacks last November.

This was an abrupt reversal for Mr. Hollande, who had planned to lift the current state of emergency this week. But with presidential elections in France less than a year away, politicians on the right leapt to accuse Mr. Hollande’s Socialist government of failing to do enough to protect French citizens. They insisted on more.

On Thursday, Parliament, in addition to extending the state of emergency for six months, added measures to expand already broad police powers of search and detention, like increasing pretrial detention periods for children; allowing searches without the approval of a judge; and authorizing the police to seize data from computers and mobile phones, and to search luggage and vehicles without judicial approval. These changes will do nothing to help France fight terrorism — it already has sweeping counterterrorism laws — and may do permanent damage to the very things the Islamic State wishes to destroy: France’s democratic freedoms and its social cohesion.

In May, a French parliamentary report admitted that the state of emergency, perhaps useful at first, had grown less effective. In fact, some 3,600 warrantless searches and 400 house arrests have resulted in a mere six terrorism-related criminal investigations. Yet the state of emergency has been abusively used to put environmental and labor-law activists under house arrest.

It also risks further alienating French Muslims, who have been the subject of most of the raids. Many report being treated in a manner that “made them feel stigmatized and eroded their trust in the French authorities,” according to Human Rights Watch. This can only serve the purpose of the Islamic State.

France should, of course, take action to protect its citizens. The intelligence apparatus needs a thorough overhaul, as a parliamentary committee urged earlier this month. And there are still questions about how Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel was able to gain access to the promenade in Nice, which was supposedly protected by both national and local police officers.

In February, President Hollande promised that the state of emergency would not be permanent, saying, “If we were to fight terrorism by weakening our principles, it would be the first defeat followed by others.” The pre-election blindness to this truth is putting France’s civil liberties and long-term security in grave danger.