 A MAJOR Council of Europe report to be released this week contains a stinging 200-page indictment of France's record on human rights.
| Guess it's their turn in the barrel. |
The report details shortcomings ranging from chronically overpopulated prisons to police brutality to summary expulsions of asylum seekers, and is especially embarrassing to a nation that takes pride in its image and history as a beacon of human rights. "There is a widening gap in several areas between the text of the law and what is actually practiced," Human Rights Commissioner Alvaro Gil-Robles said in the report, to be released on Wednesday.
| Gosh. That's never happened before, has it? |
France "has a relatively complete legal arsenal offering a high level of human rights protection," Gil-Robles said, but "does not always give itself sufficient means to put it into application." The report refers to "persistent and recurring difficulties" related to human rights as illustrated by the number of cases brought in recent years before the European Court of Human Rights. Based on the inspection in September 2005 of seven prisons and five police precincts, the report also lambasts France's weak reaction to anti-Semitic and racist crimes, and the discriminatory treatment of the country's Roma citizens, also known as gypsies.
| You have to regard them as important before you get fired up about them. Unless things have changed in the past 20 years or so, I don't think they regard such things as important. |
Noting a growing number of racist incidents, Gil-Robles regretted relevant "laws were so rarely and weakly applied," resulting in a pervasive uneasiness among the targeted groups. The report is especially critical of lapses in the treatment of delinquent minors. While lauding the recent creation of enclosed educational centres, he deplored the continuing incarceration of minors together with adult-prison populations. As of February 1, there were more than 700 minors in France's regular prisons, the report said.
| I'm not sure I'm too concerned about that. How "minor" are the minors? We have enough little bastards tried as adults in this country, and human nature isn't any different in La Belle France. |
Gil-Robles called in particular on France to "show a proof of humanity" in regards to foreign minors who must, he said, be considered as "children at risk."
I honestly don't know whether to get fired up over this or not. JFM and A5089 are in a better position than I am to judge.
Euros in general spend a lot of time frothing about "human rights," which sounds good, but which has come to include a lot of bells and whistles that seem more like wishes than rights. Do you have a "right" to dignity, or is it something you have to come up with yourself? If it's a right, how do you quantify it? Is housing a human right? Somehow I don't think it is, even though millions of Euros think so. Medical care? The same. I view human rights more as the right not to be clubbed into submission by party goons, the freedom to express myself — whether here on Rantburg or in more traditional publications, to include drawing cartoons that poke fun at Mohammad, the Pope, or Krishna, or Christ if I so desire. I'd call the right to get in my car in the morning without worrying that it's going to blow up a "human right," but not the right to a job — something else it's my responsibility to provide.
The European approach to law eforcement is similarly wobbly. Back in the heady days of my youth, your friendly neighborhood gendarme was polite, helpful, and willing to crack the nut of the local bad boy. Today he's not particularly polite, usually not helpful, and he's hesitant to thump the worst neaderthals on his beat. I don't think he's even a gendarme anymore. I recall reading a year or two ago that they were just going to be coppers. Probably 50 or a hundred years from now the pendulum will have swung back the other way, with its attendant violations, and our grandchildren will be safer in their homes and persons unless they decide on a life of crime. |
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