Public prosecutors and civil liberties: a lawyer's warning about 2027 must not stay in the courtroom

According to Le Monde, lawyer Ilan Volson-Derabours has published an opinion piece in which he states that "October will go down as the dress rehearsal for the authoritarian shock we fear for 2027". He argues that the parquet, the body of public prosecutors who decide whether to pursue, drop or press charges, should become fully independent of politics, so that it cannot become a "docile instrument of a restriction of public liberties". The detail of his argument, and of the October events he refers to, does not appear in the summary available to us: we will therefore not describe them. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

The question the lawyer poses is the right one, and it is less technical than it first appears. Who holds the hand that prosecutes, that drops cases, that requests sentences? In any state, the power to repress is never neutral: it belongs to those who command it. A parquet placed under the authority of the executive is a tool that can be shelved in calm times and taken out again when the streets fill up. Demanding its independence means removing the key from the drawer before someone troubling gets hold of it. It is hard not to applaud.

But let us beware of legal consolation. A statutory reform, however excellent, belongs to what Luxemburgist analysis calls reform: it matters, yet the ruling class takes back its concessions when its interests require it. The real question is whether a measure increases the strength and confidence of those at the bottom, or lulls them into believing that magistrates will protect them on their behalf. Independence granted from above can be eroded from above, at the whim of a majority, a budget or an appointment.

What, then, can mobilisation defend? Public liberties survive not only through texts but through how they are used. The right to demonstrate exists so long as people demonstrate, and so long as taking it away becomes politically unbearable. Mass movements, Luxemburg reminded us, educate faster than any party school; it is in collective action that people learn to know the police, the court and the prefect, and to gauge what they can oppose to them. The classic debate remains: does this anger turn into lasting organisation, with unions, assemblies, solidarity funds and legal defence networks, or does it fade once the autumn is over? We do not know, and the opinion piece, as far as we have seen it, does not say.

There is a bitter irony in watching the guardians of parliamentarism discover, a few months before a deadline, that the apparatus of the state can serve purposes other than their own. Those already subjected to it have known this all along. The lawyer is right to sound the alarm; but it must be heard beyond the courtroom. A dyke is built with bare hands too, and together.