It is the voluntary withdrawal of Julien Bayou from his functions as national secretary of Europe Ecology-The Greens and co-president of the group in the Assembly which has sharpened this question. His former companion denounced psychological violence to the party’s internal cell dedicated to gender-based and sexual violence (VSS).
The debate has been raging since, on the left as on the right, each denouncing “a media court”, “a game of ball-trap”, a political leader “thrown to the ground” or even the victim of “political instrumentalization”.
The subject is sensitive and opinions are very clear: wait for justice to do its work or shed light internally on the parties.
“We are on a somewhat subtle crest line”, explained Laurence Rossignol, PS senator last week. “We cannot refer only to justice, not simply because justice is slow (but) because we know that one in ten rape complaints leads to a conviction,” she said.
Because “it is first internally that it will be settled”, without waiting for a possible criminal sanction. She cites the case of Damien Abad, who remained Minister of Solidarity for five weeks, while a preliminary investigation was opened for attempted rape, after several complaints closed without action.
– “Private law justice” –
“If justice always made it possible to settle all these cases, it would indeed be the simplest”, abounded Tuesday on Public Senate the deputy LFI Manuel Bompard. He recalled that “a certain number of women do not wish to testify in court because they have the impression that their testimony will not be taken into account, that they will be badly received at the police station”.
Should a political organization overcome these weaknesses, regularly denounced by associations? All the more so if it has placed the fight against GBV and for feminism at the center of its values?
No, answers the majority. “The judicial precinct is the only place in a democracy where justice is done”, maintains the Minister of Justice Éric Dupond-Moretti, criticizing a “private law justice”.
Renaissance, the new presidential party, is preparing to renew the operation of its own internal cell against the VSS, with the idea of avoiding “expeditious justice”.
The cases may be “transmitted to the Movement’s Conflicts Commission, with a view to possible sanctions which may go as far as exclusion”, explains Friday in Le Parisien the Secretary of State Marlène Schiappa, but also “transmit to justice and accompany towards the complaint”.
On the right and on the extreme right, we also refer to the sole intervention of justice. Despite the slightly dissonant voice of Bruno Retailleau, campaigning to chair LR, “favorable” to the creation of a listening cell within the party.
Necessarily “imperfect”, by the admission of the parties which include them within them, the internal cells are supposed to have a duty of impartiality and to respect the contradictory. Like those that exist in hundreds of companies carrying out investigations without the intervention of the police or the justice system.
But respect for the presumption of innocence is not necessarily a priority, defend several personalities of the Nupes.
“There is a presumption of credibility, until this presumption falls because there is evidence that, in fact, she was not credible,” said Ms. Rossignol, former Minister of Women’s Rights.
The feminist revolution, “like all revolutions, it is done by cutting off heads and, sometimes, by making carts”, assures François Ruffin, LFI deputy.
“What is important is to reflect on the behaviors which are considered to be in violation of values - not necessarily with the penal code or with the law -, but which render people unfit to exercise functions “political, concludes Marylin Baldeck, director of the European Association against violence against women at work, interviewed on France Inter.
