Picard Bill

On June 22, 2000, on a day when only 18 Members of Parliament were in the Chamber, the National Assembly passed a Bill proposed by French MP Catherine Picard. The Bill’s preamble chillingly proclaims its discriminatory and improper intent “to paralyze the activities of sect organizations. “ No attempt is made to define a “sect” – a derogatory term applied in France to stigmatize and improperly classify no less than 173 religions.

Under this proposed law, any religious organization which the government decided to classify as a sect could be shut down and extinguished as a fellowship of believers, if the movement or its leaders have been convicted more than once of a criminal act. No longer would responsibility for a violation be placed on the shoulders of the violator, but the bill would criminalize the entire religion for the wrongdoing of some of its people.

The legislation also creates a new penal offence called “mental manipulation” with severe prison sentences for those found guilty. There is no medical, legal or academic definition of this term. Indeed, the scientific community has formed a strong consensus that no legally tangible phenomenon of this sort exists. French religious leaders have pointed out that it could be applied to any religious group. The Picard Bill would also prohibit any minority religion from proselytizing in the vicinity of “a hospital, retirement house, public or private institution of prevention, curing or caring, or any school from two to 18-year-old students.”

Some of the measures in the proposed law evoked the notorious Revocation Edict of 1685, which stripped French Protestants of their civil rights and denounced their faith as a “false religion” – just as today’s minority religions are stigmatized as “sects.” Ironically, in the last few years in France, there have been more than 200 court cases involving political figures, resulting in at least 150 convictions so far. Were the bill applied to political parties – and it contains language that expressly excludes “political parties defending political beliefs” – the major political parties in France would face dissolution.

Indeed, two criminal convictions were entered in 2000 against M. Jacques Guyard, who was, respectively, the Rapporteur of the 1996 and the president of the 1999 parliamentary reports on so-called “sects.” Mr. Guyard, who promoted the Picard bill in the National Assembly, was convicted, in one case, of defamation, (for stigmatizing the Anthroposophical movement as a “sect”) and in the other, of influence peddling, for which he received a one-year prison sentence and a fine. In the Anthroposophists’s case, in March 2000, a French court denounced the investigatory methods used by Guyard: