French MPs approve tough ‘anti-terror law’
5 held after bomb found
PARIS, Oct 3, (Agencies): France’s lower house of parliament overwhelmingly approved a new counterterrorism bill on Tuesday, making permanent several controversial measures in place under a nearly twoyear-old state of emergency.
The law was approved by 415 votes to 127, with 19 abstentions.
It has encountered little resistance from a public traumatised by a string of jihadist attacks, despite criticism that it will undermine civil liberties.
The vote comes just two days after more bloodshed, with a suspected Islamist radical stabbing two 20-year-old women to death in the Mediterranean port city of Marseille.
In Paris, anti-terrorism police are also investigating the discovery of a homemade bomb and a cellphone detonator in the hallway of a building in the wealthy 16th Arrondissement on Saturday.
Petrol had been sprinkled around the canisters, sources close to the inquiry said.
Five people in their early 30s were arrested over the incident, including one who is on France’s terror watch list.
The stabbings in Marseille brought to 241 the number of people killed in attacks claimed by or attributed to jihadists in France since January 2015 -- many of which have been claimed by the Islamic State group.
The group, which is fast losing territory across the remaining parts of its self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria, was quick to claim responsibility for the Marseille assault, which was carried out by a 29-yearold Tunisian.
Interior Minister Gerard Collomb has defended the anti-terror bill as a “lasting response to a lasting threat”, but it has come under fire from the French left and human rights groups.
Macron
Session
As the parliament session kicked off Tuesday, Collomb noted that the state of emergency did not prevent the Marseille attack.
“That means we need to be incessantly vigilant, seeing to it that our intelligence services can intervene well in advance every time,” he said.
The new law gives authorities the power to confine suspected jihadist sympathisers to their neighbourhood without the prior approval of a judge, and to throw a wide security cordon around places or events deemed vulnerable to attack.
It also allows the authorities to shut down a mosque or other place of worship if preachers are found to have incited attacks, glorified terrorism or circulated radical “ideas and theories”.
Lawyer Emmanuel Daoud, a member of the Parisbased International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), told AFP the law was “an unprecedented degradation of public freedoms and individual liberties”.
On Monday, anti-discrimination group SOS Racisme demonstrated outside parliament against provisions that will allow police to carry out more spot ID checks.
“People who are supposedly foreigners, black or north African will be stigmatised,” Thierry Paul Valette, head of another anti-racism group Egalite Nationale, told French daily Liberation.
The law, designed to replace the state of emergency that France has been under since the wave of bombings and shootings at Paris nightspots and France’s national stadium in November 2015, is expected to come into force on November 1.
President Emmanuel Macron, painted by rivals as weak on security during his election campaign, has already acted to bolster counter-terrorism efforts, creating a task force in June to improve coordination among France’s multiple intelligence agencies.
The anti-terrorism bill has met little resistance from the public, with people still on edge after the series of Islamist-related attacks and smaller incidents that have followed.