pichel’s blog
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Hadopi 2 – Democracy 2 :-)))
Finally it’s somewhat reassuring to see that some institutions are still defending the essential principles of democracy, as they were thought 200 years ago. The Constitutional Council (approximative traduction) has finally decided that two dispositions of the voted law were disagreeing too strong with some principles. And it is interesting to understand which of them.
First of all : freedom of speech. And they haven’t gone into the constitution to defend that, but relied on the 1789’s Humans Right Declaration ! It’s 11th article states (approximately) :
Free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious human rights : every citizen has so the right to talk, write, print freely, apart from having to respond to abuse of this freedom to the extent determined by law.
The council estimated that nowadays, the freedom of talking, wrinting and printing was to be declined and extended to the freedom of publishing stuff on the Internet, and that deprivating Internet access to someone was in consequence a privation of freedom. As a consequence, such a sentence can only be pronouced by a judge and not a simple administrative commission.
Secondly, the text introduced the obligation for the acused person (which is only the owner of the Internet access) to produce the proof of his innocence. This clearly violates the principle that every person accusated of anything is to be considered as non-guilty untill the end of the judgment.
Nowadays, every politician, every buisinessman, want things to go fast, even in juridic matters, and they’re trying to automate all this. The Constitutional Council opportunately reminds them of the principles of democracy. Privating thousands of people from certain liberties in an automated way, IS NOT a democratic way of getting things done, in any manner. Dot.