La Cimade, France, land of asylum... The Senate votes to exclude associations from administrative detention centers

The Senate voted on Monday, May 12, to remove from the associations present in administrative detention centers (CRA) their mission to provide legal advice to foreigners detained with a view to their expulsion, a measure strongly supported by Bruno Retailleau and criticized by the left.

"It is high time we realized that associations do not define state policy," said Republican Senator Marie-Carole Ciuntu, who made no secret of her intentions when she presented a bill to the upper house.

Its text, adopted by 227 votes to 113, aims to exclude associations from the CRAs and entrust "the role of providing information on access to foreign law" to the French Office for Immigration and Integration (OFII), an organization under the supervision of the Ministry of the Interior.

Currently, five associations, including Cimade, France Terre d'Asile and Forum réfugiés, have been mandated by the State as part of a public contract to intervene in the CRAs, where they support the people detained by providing them with legal information and assistance.

But the latter, according to Bruno Retailleau, "are going beyond their missions and are actually turning them against the State by hindering its action through pure militancy," insisted the Minister of the Interior, "strongly" supporting this text from his former colleagues on the senatorial right.

The senatorial majority, a right-wing-centrist alliance, also considers that the current organization leads to a "systematization" and a "massification" of contentious appeals.

The transfer of this responsibility to the OFII, on the one hand to inform detained foreigners, and secondly to lawyers for legal assistance, would also offer, according to her, more "impartiality", and would lead to savings for the State, estimated at 6.5 million euros by Bruno Retailleau.

The entire left, and a handful of centrists, opposed the text during fairly heated debates, fearing an attack on "fundamental principles of law" and freedom of association.

Communist Senator Ian Brossat denounced "a real regression, an organized and assumed decline in the right of imprisoned persons to have access to independent, neutral and effective legal information."

The associations affected by this text are also up in arms: in an article in Le Monde published on Sunday, they feared "a fatal blow to the exercise of the rights of persons deprived of their liberty and to democratic transparency."

This bill is now being sent to the National Assembly with an "accelerated procedure" for review activated by the government, which could allow for a faster parliamentary process.