Part IV - The reform agenda for recovered sovereignty
14 - Justice, law and legal sovereignty
French justice suffers from a profound structural imbalance: under-applied sentences for genuine criminals, a magistracy that has progressively freed itself from all responsibility toward the society it is supposed to serve, and a Constitutional Council that has transformed legal interpretation into unelected political power. This situation is not acceptable in a sovereign State where all authority proceeds from the people.
Restored legal sovereignty
The Constitutional Council is dissolved. It had become the symbol of political endogamy: its members appointed by political power ended up incarnating the interests of those who had designated them rather than the general interest. Its function of censuring laws voted by the National Assembly and obstructing popular referendums is incompatible with the sovereignty of the people.
The constitutional review of laws voted by the National Assembly is transferred to a dedicated commission of the refounded Senate, in coherence with its new four-bloc composition (magistrates and justice, military, traditional producers, strategic and technological producers). This review is exercised exclusively a priori, that is to say before promulgation: once a law is promulgated, it can no longer be challenged on grounds of unconstitutionality, as was the case before the constitutional revision of 2008. This discipline guarantees the stability of legislative decisions and prevents the diversion of constitutional review into a tool of permanent obstruction. Individual recourse before the courts for failure to correctly apply a codified fundamental right obviously remains open: this is not the same procedure as constitutional review.
Le contrôle ne s'applique pas aux référendums populaires, qui sont par construction l'expression directe de la souveraineté du peuple et ne peuvent être soumis à aucune chambre de contrôle. Le Sénat refondé contrôle donc l'Assemblée, pas le peuple. C'est précisément l'inverse de la doctrine actuelle où le Conseil constitutionnel s'arrogeait le pouvoir de censurer la souveraineté populaire.
Broad floating interpretive principles are abolished as autonomous sources of superior law: not the fundamental rights themselves, but their extensive jurisprudential use through which unelected judges have progressively substituted their interpretation for the will of the legislator. The 2004 Environmental Charter and the preamble to the Constitution of the Fourth Republic cease to be instruments allowing the magistracy to circumvent democratically voted laws. The fundamental rights of citizens - presumption of innocence, freedom of expression, protection against arbitrariness - are codified in precise, concrete, and enforceable laws. What disappears is praetorian interpretation without democratic mandate: not the protection of citizens. The law must be legible to the ordinary citizen, not reserved for a caste of jurists who hold exclusive interpretive power over it.
The primacy of the sovereign will of the people is explicitly affirmed: any law may be submitted to referendum, and the popular decision takes precedence over any legal hierarchy including that of international treaties and conventions. The diplomatic consequences of such a decision are managed politically: they cannot prevent the expression of the national will.
The restoration of high treason
High treason was removed from the penal code during the constitutional revision of 2007. Removing the legal definition of a crime does not retroactively suppress the acts that constituted that crime before its removal. Just as removing rape from the penal code would not make past rapes legal: removal makes invisible, it does not legitimize. The act was high treason, whether the penal code had been modified beforehand or not.
High treason is restored in the penal code with its original definition enriched. An explicit declaration accompanies this restoration: the suppression of 2007 had no retroactive effect on acts committed under the empire of prior law.
La haute trahison ne porte pas sur le contenu d’un traité jugé politiquement mauvais : c’est un jugement subjectif et contestable. Elle porte sur la violation délibérée d’une décision populaire souveraine exprimée par référendum : c’est un fait objectif, documenté et incontestable. Le cas central est celui du référendum du 29 mai 2005 : 54,68% des Français votent NON au Traité constitutionnel européen. Le traité de Lisbonne, texte quasi-identique, est ratifié par voie parlementaire en février 2008, contournant délibérément ce mandat populaire. C’est de la haute trahison caractérisée et documentée : pas un jugement politique, un fait.
The abolition of the statute of limitations for crimes
The statute of limitations is a legal fiction that protects the guilty at the expense of victims and society. It rests on the idea that elapsed time erases the gravity of an act: which sovereign justice refuses. A crime remains a crime regardless of the time elapsed since its commission.
France extends to all crimes what already exists for crimes against humanity: total imprescriptibility. Any documented criminal act can be investigated and judged without time limit. The distinction between crimes and misdemeanors is maintained and structures this overhaul. Subject to total imprescriptibility are crimes in the technical sense of criminal law: rape, murder, assassination, acts of terrorism, high treason, sexual crimes against minors, serious predatory crimes, crimes against republican institutions. For misdemeanors (offenses punishable by a sentence of less than ten years imprisonment), the statute of limitations is maintained but doubled compared to the current regime: six years instead of three for ordinary misdemeanors, twenty years for aggravated misdemeanors. The objective is twofold: to target exactly what deserves to be imprescriptible (crimes that mark a victim or society for life), and not to overburden the judicial apparatus with old files whose evidence has degraded to the point of making judgment impossible.
This abolition applies to offenses that existed in French law at the time of the facts: it does not create new criminal retroactivity, it abolishes the mechanism that allowed the guilty to escape justice by waiting long enough. The sought effect is threefold: justice rendered to victims even belatedly, end of the indecent impunity of criminals who boast of their acts decades after the facts, and structural deterrent effect on the very commission of these crimes: the one who no longer has the hope of the statute of limitations weighs the risk of their act differently.
The accountability of magistrates
Magistrates render justice in the name of the people: not in their own name, not in the name of grand moral principles supposedly superior to the collective will. This reality has a logical and non-negotiable consequence: they are accountable for their decisions to the society they serve.
Any serious breach - release of a criminal who reoffends, decision manifestly contrary to the general interest, characterized negligence in the application of the law - is subject to investigation before a commission of the reformed Senate. This commission is composed according to the proportion of the four blocs of the Senate: magistrates, military, traditional producers, strategic and technological producers. Experts and citizens may be consulted to enlighten the debates, but the final decision belongs to the senators: to avoid any confiscation of power by a particular expertise or professional caste.
This accountability does not destroy judicial independence: it replaces it within its legitimate framework. An independent judge is a judge who rules without political pressure on individual cases. It is not a judge who escapes all collective accountability for the consequences of their decisions for society.
The sought effect of this accountability is explicitly assumed: a magistrate who knows that their release decision may engage their own responsibility in the event of recidivism becomes mechanically more demanding in their risk assessment. Early releases and sentence reductions become rarer; prosecution requisitions harden; the real dangerousness of profiles is better weighed. This is a major cog in the assumed toughening of the project's criminal policy - not an undesirable collateral effect but an explicit objective. French justice over the last thirty years suffered from a structural asymmetry: the magistrate who released a reoffending criminal bore no personal consequence, while the victims of recidivism bore all the consequences. The project restores symmetry: the one who decides assumes.
This doctrine commits on the basis of an objective and documented fact: the proven recidivism of an individual following a release decision, sentence reduction, or non-application of the maximum sentence provided by law. This is a factual criterion, not a political assessment. The Senate commission seized examines the decision-making chain to calibrate the sanction according to the nature of the identified failure.
The execution of sentences
Pronounced sentences are fully executed: without sentence reduction, without probation, with mandatory cumulation. This rule guarantees that the sanction reflects the gravity of all crimes committed and that justice is predictable and coherent for victims as well as for the convicted. The State allocates the logistical and human means necessary for this requirement: detention places, penitentiary staff, medical and psychological follow-up. Setting the rule without providing the means to apply it would be one more hypocrisy in the continuity of the current system.
Differentiated rehabilitation
Not all crimes deserve the same penitentiary response. The distinction is established on the basis of documented recidivism statistics: not on ideological considerations.
Crimes with statistically documented very high recidivism - sexual crimes, rape, pedophilia, serious violent crimes with proven predation - call for a response whose primary function is the protection of society. No investment in rehabilitation for these profiles: detention is secured, psychiatric follow-up exists for the management of detention, not for reintegration. If a release occurs in due course, it is accompanied by intensive lifetime monitoring, an electronic bracelet, and precise perimeter and contact prohibitions. Recidivism automatically triggers the maximum sentence without appeal.
Circumstantial crimes - first offenses, juvenile delinquency, crimes without structural predation - call for a response whose primary function is rehabilitation. Active program during detention: qualifying professional training, psychological follow-up, housing preparation. No abrupt release without a solution. Post-sentence monitoring and mentoring by voluntary associations or companies.
Clarification on the maximum sentence applicable to recidivists of very high recidivism crimes
The maximum sentence that applies automatically and without appeal in the event of recidivism of a very high recidivism crime (sexual crimes, rape, pedophilia, serious violent crimes with proven predation) is real life imprisonment without accommodation. This means: no sentence reduction, no automatic reduction, no conditional release after a quantum of years, no return to freedom at the end of a safety period. Detention is definitive for the life of the convicted person, it is precisely this arrangement that allows republican justice to fulfill its primary function of definitive protection of society against irreducibly predatory profiles.
A single possibility of release subsists: the presidential pardon - which becomes in this project a royal pardon -, a historical attribute of the head of State since 1791. This residual possibility is strictly framed. It is not a measure of general clemency nor a tool of political pressure: it is an exceptional mechanism reserved for cases where a judicial error becomes proven a posteriori, or for cases where a major and documented circumstance justifies a re-examination of the convicted person's situation. The king who grants a pardon answers for it personally and publicly before the people. No collective pardon is possible. No automatic pardon is possible. The pardon therefore remains an ultra-rare exception, which preserves the doctrine of real life imprisonment without making it theoretically irrevocable, a precautionary principle against always possible judicial error.
This articulation preserves the royal attribute without making it a tool for trivializing sentences: it places the king before his direct responsibility toward the people, and forbids him from serving as a political shock absorber for judicial decisions that public opinion cannot digest.
Penitentiary infrastructure
The project will increase imprisonments: this is assumed and planned. New prison places are built rapidly, planned by the Planning Commission like the other sovereignty workstreams. Detention conditions are humane but not comfortable. The objective is the individual cell: prison overcrowding is a factory of criminality that contradicts the very objective of detention. Separation is strict: first offenders separated from hardened criminals, sexual crimes separated from the rest, minors separated from adults.
Foreign prisoners are systematically expelled upon completion of sentence. Bilateral prisoner transfer agreements allow the serving of sentences in the country of origin when they exist. A country that refuses to take back its condemned nationals suffers immediate diplomatic and visa consequences: this is a non-negotiable condition in any bilateral agreement.
Reformed juvenile justice
Juvenile delinquency is increasingly precocious and increasingly organized: the current system has created a de facto impunity that has been methodically exploited by criminal networks. This impunity ends.
The age of criminal responsibility is lowered to 10 years. Before 10 years, educational measures apply: no criminal sentence. Between 10 and 18 years, juvenile justice applies but with real and executed sentences. The criminal record is continuous from minority to majority: the reset at 18 that erased years of delinquency and allowed a clean slate before justice is abolished. The same sentence applies for the same act whether one is a minor or an adult: no automatic reduction linked to age.
Trois niveaux de structures de détention distincts et séparés accueillent les mineurs selon leur âge : centre éducatif fermé renforcé pour les 10 à 15 ans, avec encadrement éducatif et disciplinaire fort et formation obligatoire ; centre de détention pour mineurs pour les 15 à 18 ans, avec conditions proches de la prison adulte et travail obligatoire ; transfert automatique en prison adulte à la majorité avec casier complet transféré.
Parental responsibility
Between 10 and 15 years, parents are criminally and financially responsible for their child's acts in addition to the child's own sentences. The fine is proportional to the gravity of the acts and the parents' income. If State allowances or benefits are received, they are partially suspended for a determined period. Recidivism automatically aggravates parental sanctions, triggers a social investigation into the family environment, and may lead to the placement of the child if a proven parental failure is established.
Below 10 years, a proven delinquent act entails the immediate placement of the child in foster care: without negotiation, without delay, without a second chance. The parents have demonstrated their incapacity. The child is monitored by social services until majority.
Prevention - a systemic vision
Juvenile delinquency is produced by the environment in which the child evolves: not by an absence of targeted prevention arrangements. If family policy works, if housing is decent, if schools are of quality, if employment exists in the territories, and if the State is present everywhere, delinquency mechanically recedes. Prevention is transversal: it is the entire project that produces it, not an isolated workstream.
Exceptional situations
Inspired by the historical mechanisms of full powers - those granted to de Gaulle in 1958 during the crisis of the Fourth Republic - an exceptional prerogative allows the State to act immediately to preserve national sovereignty and public order when ordinary procedures are insufficient. It functions like the current Article 16 but with reinforced safeguards to prevent any abuse. It does not suspend the law: it restores its primary meaning, the law must serve national sovereignty, not obstruct it.