France’s top court OKs controversial surveillance bill

President Francois Hollande himself was among those who asked the Council to rule on the constitutionality of a law that waives the need for warrants to use phone taps, cameras and hidden microphones and allows authorities to force Internet providers to monitor suspicious behavior.

Friday’s decision was the final step before the law can come into effect. An article on financing the intelligence was also not approved. They say that the law, parts of which apply not only to terrorism but also to other situations such as organized crime or “attacks on the republican form of institutions”, lacks sufficient checks and balances.

Groups including France’s far-left parties, the United Nations’ human rights commission and global privacy advocates condemned the bill.

In a statement titled “Shame on France” the group La Quadrature du Net said: “By validating nearly all surveillance measures provided in the Surveillance Law adopted on 25 June, the French Constitutional Council legalises mass surveillance and endorses a historical decline in fundamental rights”. The provision was a “clearly disproportionate breach of the right to the respect of privacy and of the secret of correspondences”, the council said in a statement. It also rejected an article on worldwide surveillance on the grounds that lawmakers had not sufficiently defined conditions for its use, as stated by Reuters.

Under the new law, surveillance agencies will in exceptional cases be able to use so-called “IMSI Catcher” spy devices that record all types of telephone, Internet or text-messaging conversations in an area. Articles in the bill allowing intelligence services to bypass the advisory group, and allowing anyone outside of France to be placed under surveillance, were struck down as too broad. The report also expressed concern that the bill had been passed “on the basis of broad and ill-defined goals, without prior judicial authorisation and without adequate and independent oversight mechanism”.

Although the legislation was first announced and prepared last year, it was officially introduced, debated and voted upon only months after extremist Islamist gunmen killed 17 people in and around Paris in January.