The deputies approved Friday in the Hemicycle the establishment of a minimum base of investigation to prevent a complaint from being dismissed too quickly, a flagship measure of the “comprehensive” law against sexist, sexual and intra-family violence.
The article, largely consensual, was adopted unanimously. It provides for the principle of a minimum base of investigative acts “in any procedure relating to sexual, sexist or intra-family violence”. This goes from interviewing the victim and the accused, to the search of the latter’s home, including the search for other potential victims. One way, for Horizons MP Isabelle Rauch, to send the complainants a “simple message: we listen to you, we believe you, we take care of it”.
In favor of the article, the National Rally (RN) deputy Thomas Ménage nevertheless proposed, in vain, to make the search optional – “only when it is useful” -, in particular to free up time for investigators. The ecologist Marie-Charlotte Garin, rapporteur on this part of the text, cited in response the case of Dominique Pelicot, sentenced in 2024 to 20 years in prison for having drugged, raped and delivered his wife Gisèle to dozens of strangers. “He is arrested because he is filming under women’s skirts (…) it is because there was a search of the home that we were able to find the phone, the camcorder and all the horrors that were on it,” she stressed.
The deputies also maintained a deadline of one year to carry out the investigative acts, established in committee.
A expanded definition of domestic violence
The government, however, removed by amendment the obligation for the judicial police officer to draw up a report after one year justifying that the investigative acts have been carried out. The Minister of Equality between Women and Men Aurore Bergé notably invoked the “procedural excess” which weighs on the investigators, and stressed that the acts carried out would already appear in the procedure.
Colette Capdevielle (Socialist Party) on the contrary deplored it, arguing that the report would make it possible to “justify to the victim why the twelve-month deadline was not respected” if necessary.
In the wake of the “MeToo of the Armed Forces” movement, the Assembly also approved the end of an exception in the code of criminal procedure, requiring the prosecutor to obtain the prior opinion of the Ministry of the Armed Forces before any prosecution against one of its agents, when the facts concern sexual, sexist or intra-family violence.
Earlier on Friday, parliamentarians had adopted the creation of an “authority to combat sexual and intra-family violence”, a body independent of the government, responsible for evaluating public policies, reporting on feminicides and infanticides in France, but also conducting research.
Another key article adopted: a definition of intra-family violence. The deputies broadened the scope, including “economic violence” (non-payment of alimony, cases of theft or extortion) but also conversion therapy, committed against a minor or in the family or marital context.
