Part III - Institutions
8 - High Court of Public Evaluation (HCEP)
The Court of Auditors exists. It audits, controls, evaluates. On paper this is exactly what a sovereign state needs. In reality it is an institution whose members are appointed by the executive power it is supposed to control: the first president appointed by the president of the Republic, the prosecutor general appointed by decree in the Council of Ministers, the chamber presidents by the same mechanism. An institution whose appointments are political cannot produce an independent evaluation. It can produce a presentable evaluation and that is not the same thing. And when the institution is locked from within by decades of cross-appointments, nothing more can be extracted from it. Every cog is potentially a cog of the system one seeks to replace.
The Court of Auditors is not reformed. It is replaced. The HCEP is not an improved Court of Auditors but a complete institutional rupture with the logic of political appointments disguised as technical independence.
What it is
The HCEP is the central body for independent evaluation of public policies. It produces prospective analyses - before decisions are taken - and retrospective analyses - after their effects are measurable. It transmits its conclusions to the government, the reformed Senate, the National Assembly, and the people. Its reports are public. It does not govern, it does not legislate, it does not arbitrate: it evaluates and reports.
Its independence is not a posture, it is structural. No member may combine their role with an executive or legislative function, past, present, or future. One same company, organization, or institution may not provide more than one member. Any link liable to compromise neutrality is declared before appointment and submitted to validation. These rules are not symbolic safeguards: they are the material conditions without which independent evaluation is a fiction.
Its composition
21 members divided into 7 sectoral bodies of 3 members each: judiciary and justice, military and national security, strategic industry, energy, agriculture, trade and SMEs, sciences and technologies. Each body combines three complementary profiles: a major actor capable of a global and long-term vision, an operational expert who connects practice to strategic objectives, and a small field actor who guarantees that the body remains connected to concrete reality: the micro-farm, the small industrial company, the local innovator. Without this third profile, the HCEP would quickly become what it is supposed to avoid, a chamber of great signatures disconnected from reality.
How members are selected
Same logic as for the Senate: sortition from lists of volunteers, profile verification by an independent panel. Any person meeting the competence criteria for their sectoral body may register freely. The draw is conducted body by body and profile by profile. If the drawn candidate is validated - competence confirmed, independence verified, conflicts of interest absent - he is appointed. If invalidated, the reasons are made public and a new draw is made. No discretionary appointment, no rewarding of cronies, no political list.
If an undeclared conflict of interest is discovered after appointment, the reformed Senate initiates proceedings in a public and adversarial procedure. If the compromise is established, the member is revoked and replaced according to the same criteria. The decision and the report are made public.
Its evolution
La composition de la HCEP n’est pas figée. Les besoins stratégiques de la nation évoluent : ce qui est critique aujourd’hui ne l’est peut-être pas dans vingt ans, et de nouveaux domaines peuvent émerger. Toute modification de la composition d’un corps ou de la répartition des sièges est décidée à la majorité simple de l’ensemble de l’organe, après débat public retransmis en direct. Le nombre impair de membres garantit des décisions majoritaires claires. Aucun corps ne peut être éjecté ni modifié sans justification transparente et validée collectivement.
The real powers of the HCEP
The HCEP enlightens and recommends, it does not govern and does not constrain. But its reports are not consultative opinions without consequence. They engage the government in a relationship of public accountability of which the people are the final arbiter.
Every official evaluation or anticipation report published by the HCEP imposes on the government an official response within six weeks. This response is not an administrative note: it is an oral address by the government, broadcast live, which acknowledges the conclusions of the HCEP and publicly sets out the government's position, whether it follows the recommendation, partially departs from it, or refuses it. This six-week deadline is deliberate: it allows time to debate it in the Council of Ministers, to seriously examine the substance, and to formulate a response commensurate with the institution that produced the report.
The government that responds and chooses not to follow a recommendation exercises its sovereign right. It commits its word publicly. If the policy pursued proves disastrous and the ignored recommendation turns out to have been right, this word turns against it before the people: in any subsequent censure procedure, the HCEP report and the government's response constitute documented and public exhibits.
The government that does not respond within six weeks is summoned by the reformed Senate. It then has one additional week to produce its response in public session, the time of one Council of Ministers to decide and assume responsibility. If this response does not come, a censure referendum is automatically triggered on grounds of constitutional breach of duty. Ignoring a constitutional institution is not an administrative oversight: it is a serious fault against the sovereign architecture that the people have validated. The people decide.
The deliberation procedure in the event of lasting divergence
The HCEP evaluates, it does not govern. But a HCEP can be wrong. Its models may rest on assumptions invalidated by the facts, its targets may have been poorly calibrated from the outset, its evaluations may lack blind spots. Conversely, the government and the Planning Commission may fail in the implementation of well-calibrated policies. In both cases, the nation must have a mechanism to decide: where is the error, and how to correct it.
The deliberation procedure opens in two cases.
Automatically, when a significant gap persists between the defined target and the observed trajectory on a strategic indicator monitored by the HCEP: typically a gap of more than 20% over three consecutive years.
On referral by one of the three other institutional actors (government, Planning Commission, or reformed Senate itself), at any time, when one of these actors contests the HCEP's diagnosis or considers that a divergence requires immediate adversarial analysis.
Four actors participate in the procedure:
- the HCEP, which presents its diagnosis, its initial assumptions, the elements that have invalidated or confirmed them, and its reading of the causes of the divergence
- the Planning Commission, which defined or co-defined the target: it sets out the calibration assumptions retained, the programmed implementation trajectory, and its evaluation of what worked or did not
- the government, which sets out the actual execution, the obstacles encountered, the arbitrations made, and its own evaluation of the causes of the gap
- the reformed Senate, which initiates, arbitrates, and decides. It is not a party to the technical debate: it is the sovereign body of resolution
La procédure se déroule en audition publique retransmise en direct, selon un calendrier fixé par le Sénat (typiquement huit à douze semaines d'instruction). Chaque acteur présente sa position écrite avant audition. Les trois autres acteurs peuvent la contester, demander des clarifications, et produire des contre-expertises. Les échanges sont publics et intégralement archivés.
The reformed Senate votes a reasoned and public resolution that may conclude with one of the following three cases:
- the initial target was poorly calibrated: the assumptions of the Planning Commission or the HCEP proved false. The target is revised accordingly. The HCEP and the Planning Commission publicly acknowledge the erroneous parameters and adjust their models. No sanction: a modeling error is not a fault, it is a limit of knowledge. Public transparency on the correction is the sufficient response.
- the target remains achievable, implementation has failed: corrective policies are defined by the government in response, under Senate supervision. If the failure is characterized and persistent, the accountability mechanisms provided elsewhere in the institutional workstream apply: possible revocation of the Planning Commissioner, possible revocation of a minister or the government.
- the target was poorly calibrated AND implementation has failed: combination of the two preceding responses.
The deliberation entails no sanction mechanism targeting members of the HCEP, even in the event of a characterized evaluation error. This rule is deliberate and fundamental.
If the HCEP could be politically sanctioned for its evaluations, it would be pushed to produce politically acceptable evaluations rather than technically sound ones. It would become what it replaces: an institution that speaks so as not to offend, not an institution that evaluates to enlighten. The possibility that the HCEP may be wrong is the price to pay for it to remain independent. Its credibility is built on the quality of its work over time, not on the absence of error.
The only grounds for revocation of a member of the HCEP remain those defined in the general rules of composition: undeclared conflict of interest, established compromise, characterized personal failure. No vote, no divergence of evaluation, no Senate arbitration against them can entail the revocation of a member. This is the material condition of its independence, in the same way as the separation of institutional roles and the mode of designation by sortition.
What it is not
The HCEP is not a tribunal. It does not sanction, it evaluates. It is not a paralyzing counterpower, it enlightens. Its strength is not coercive, it is cognitive. In a regime where strategic decisions are taken over long horizons, having a body capable of saying what worked, what failed and why, without depending on those who decided, is not an institutional luxury but the condition of a collective learning that electoral regimes, subject to the urgency of the cycle, are structurally incapable of producing.