PARIS: French lawmakers now have the power to launch a US-style impeachment of their president under a new law passed yesterday.
Heads of state in France have until now enjoyed some of the strongest legal protections in the West — only removable in cases of high treason.
But the law approved by the Constitutional Council yesterday sets out a procedure for removing the president from office in cases where there has been a “breach of their duties that is clearly incompatible with the exercise of their mandate”.
The impeachment process first requires 10 percent of upper house senators and 10 percent of lower house deputies to sign a resolution.
A two-thirds majority in both houses of parliament must then vote to convene a special session of select lawmakers known as the High Court.
The court would have a month to decide the issue, with another two-thirds majority required.
It has taken 12 years to get the reform passed since it was first announced by then-president Jacques Chirac in 2002.
It only came before deputies in the lower house in January 2012 at the end of Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency and was passed by senators last month.
Although the president can be impeached, heads of state are still protected from criminal prosecution during their five-year terms in office.
Meanwhile. the French government has decided not to support the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU and US as long as a controversial stipulation is included.
France, like the UK and Germany, will block the trade deal all together if the mechanism of investor-to-state dispute settlement (ISDS) is included; EurActiv France reported.
The clause appears in most free trade agreements, and would leave France defenseless against foreign companies taking legal action against it if laws and legislation stunt profits.
“France did not want the ISDS to be included in the negotiation mandate,” France’s Secretary of State for Foreign Trade, Matthias Fekl told the French Senate. “We have to preserve the right of the state to set and apply its own standards, to maintain the impartiality of the justice system and to allow the people of France, and the world, to assert their values,” he added.
Due to this stumbling block, there will be no “significant advances” in the trade agreement, which has been a sour point in US-EU relations. France earlier said it wouldn’t sign the TTIP as long as the US continued spying on EU allies.Agencies
