Drug trafficking: Constitutional Council censors six articles of the law but validates the solitary confinement regime

On Thursday, June 12, the Constitutional Council censored a handful of articles of the law aimed at "freeing France from the trap of drug trafficking," but validated, with one reservation, the prison regime of isolation planned for the most dangerous drug traffickers.

Among the six articles censored in whole or in part are the experimentation with the use of algorithmic intelligence against drug trafficking and the separate report, which allows certain information to be withheld from the lawyers of the accused.

The Council had been approached by left-wing MPs, who believed that many articles of this law posed "serious threats" to the rule of law. They asked it in particular to censor the article concerning the now-iconic creation of high-security prison units for the most dangerous traffickers. The law provides for them to be assigned to these units by decision of the Minister of Justice, under certain conditions.

The accompanying prison regime provides, among other things, for supervised full-body searches in the event of contact without the supervision of an officer. The members of the Constitutional Council declared this article to be constitutional, while expressing a reservation on the issue of full-body searches.

They should only be carried out when surveillance by a prison officer "has been prevented by particular circumstances relating to the privacy of the detained person, the need to preserve the confidentiality of their exchanges or exceptional difficulties in organizing the prison service," the Council stressed.

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The latter also partially censored the article concerning the widespread use of videoconferencing for people detained in these anti-organized crime units. He considered that this constituted an "excessive infringement on the rights of defense" for people placed in pre-trial detention.

On the remote activation of an electronic device for wiretapping, he ruled that the provisions of the article pursued "the constitutional objectives of searching for perpetrators of offences and preventing breaches of public order" and were "surrounded by sufficient guarantees to avoid disproportionate interference with the right to respect for private life" .