support, especially for extending it to persons convicted for terrorist-related offences, the
Contrôleur général, via an Opinion dated 5 October 2015, asked the Government to reject this
measure. In fact, for the first time in French criminal law, preventive detention has removed the
objective link between guilt and responsibility, between offence and punishment, in favour of the
concept of dangerousness, while allowing a person to be kept imprisoned even after his sentence
has been served, for a duration that can be renewed an infinite number of times.
Finally, in a Recommendation dated 13 November 2015, established according to the
emergency procedure provided pursuant to Article 9 of the Law dated 30 October 2007, the
Contrôleur général questioned the Minister of the Interior on the subject of the collective
transportation of foreign nationals who were taken in for questioning in Calais. This mass
processing resulted in a summary process that deprived the persons concerned of access to their
rights, and therefore constituted a practice contrary to human dignity and misuse of administrative
detention.
In addition to these news snippets, throughout 2015, the CGLPL pursued its task by
visiting the institutions, on-site surveys and written exchanges with persons deprived of their liberty
and with the administrations in charge of them. Even here, there is sufficient proof that the balance
between necessary restrictions of liberty and the respect of the fundamental rights of persons
deprived of liberty has not been respected.
It must be borne in mind that confinement, if it obeys differentiated regimes justified by
different objectives, must still lead to the same end: returning the person deprived of liberty to
the free world.
In prison, the detained person must be taken care of in conditions that help in his/her
reintegration. Even if punishment is one of the objectives of the incarceration, it must never be the
exclusive goal. Therefore, maintaining family bonds, learning, professional training, access to work,
access to healthcare, exercising welfare rights and returning to employment must be part of the
detention. And yet, very often, these fundamental rights are sacrificed in the name of security, or
limited due to the lack of staff or due to overcrowding. Rules of security prohibit or restrict,
sometimes to the point of abuse, several measures that are necessary for reintegration: accessing
the Internet is almost always impossible even though today, it is vital for carrying out certain
processes; permissions to leave for exercising welfare rights, maintaining family bonds and
searching for employment are today looked upon with suspicion, and are reducing in number even
though they are profitable and occur without any problem in a large majority of cases.
In other places, the deprivation of liberty is a means, but must never transform into a
punishment. It must not be subject to generalised and systematic security measures, which
implement precautions that are not always justified in the short term, and which compromise the
chances of the cure of a patient or the reintegration of a minor.
In psychiatric treatment, the hospitalised patient must be treated to ensure that he/she
can find a lifestyle that is as normal as possible. Psychiatric institutions must be places of resocialisation, which aims at preserving the independence of patients or at helping in teaching them.
And yet, the CGLPL notes that, very often, confinement leads to the infantilisation and the
relieving of responsibility of patients, that the preoccupations of security intrude in psychiatric
practices, and that the fear of absconding or the lack of caregivers result in the patients being
deprived of the attention or the limited liberty that should have been granted to them. The
therapeutic outing regime, for example, sometimes obeys security constraints that are greater than
those provided by the laws, thereby resulting in making it impossible for measures that are known
to be necessary. At the same time, security considerations sometimes result, without any legal basis,
in excessive measures of deprivation of liberty: in certain departments, hospitalised patients are
systematically placed in seclusion rooms; the presence of a patient hospitalised without consent
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