Deputies and Senators The Republicans seized the Constitutional Council to invalidate the ban on corporal punishment.
Legislative feud over spanking. While the recently adopted Equality & Citizenship law set in stone the ban on parents educating their children through physical and psychological violence, 60 deputies and 60 senators from the Republicans (LR) party seized the Constitutional Council to invalidate the text.
Article 371-1 of the Equality & Citizenship law indeed bans all “cruel, degrading or humiliating” acts which sometimes accompany the education of children. The list is long and of course includes corporal punishment (spanking, slapping, pinching, kicking, shaking…) but also verbal and psychological attacks (shouts, insults, lies, threats, rejection, emotional blackmail…).
Senators and LR deputies therefore seized the Wise Men in order to reconsider this text, the merits of which they dispute. The information, posted on social networks by Laurence Rossignol, Minister for Families, Children and Women’s Rights, was confirmed at Why actor by the Constitutional Council. The case is pending, and the decision is expected to be released on January 19.
LR deputies seized the Constitute Council. to defend the right of adults to hit children. Sorry. pic.twitter.com/vm4HTqFxXW
– laurence nightingale (@laurossignol) January 4, 2017
In their referral, LR senators focus especially on spanking, the most publicized element of this law, which they consider to be a legislative rider. In other words, they consider that the text has no relation to the object of the Equality & Citizenship law. “This provision has no connection, even indirectly, with the initial version of the bill,” they write.
A vision contested by the ministry behind this ban. “The referral to senators LR reduces the contribution of the law to the prohibition of spanking while it is” bodily violence “, which is much broader than spanking, explains the cabinet of Laurence Rossignol. On the contrary, we consider that education without violence participates in the construction of citizenship ”.
About fifty countries, including 21 from the European Union, have banned corporal punishment and educational violence. Last March, France was singled out by the Council of Europe for its lack of a sufficiently clear ban.
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