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January 24, 2003
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Friday
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Ziqa’ad 20, 1423
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French MPs move to form pan-European legal zone
By Our Correspondent
PARIS, Jan 23: The French National Assembly and Senate have announced major decisions that allow France to make a giant stride towards construction of a pan-European legal jurisdiction.
The move makes France one of the first major members of the European Union to set in motion a process that will one day result in the creation of a Europe-wide judicial zone where all EU members will observe the same laws, and where police will have very much the same powers.
The legal commission of the National Assembly, which yesterday took part in an important joint meeting in Versailles with the German Bundestag, has proposed, for its part, that the French Parliament adopt a resolution that would bring about creation of a Pan-European public prosecutor’s office which would be charged with the prosecution of “serious acts of transnational criminality.”
The resolution, which is the brainchild of Representative Pierre Lequiller, a man considered as close to French president Jacques Chirac, is expected to be adopted by the entire French National assembly in the coming days.
Once it is adopted, the resolution would call for “the full application of the principal of mutual recognition of judicial decisions, the harmonization of rules with regard to the subject of incrimination and the establishment of proof .”
Meanwhile, the French Senate adopted a law that would revise the French Constitution in such a way that France would approve the creation of a Europe-wide arrest warrant (a mandat d’arret Europeen), that, in the words of the authors of the measure, would “permit Europe to fight more effectively against organized delinquency and terrorism.”
With the adoption of the measure by the Senate, which follows that last December by the French National Assembly, the proposed law will now be brought before a joint constitutional convention to be held later this year at Versailles which would amend the French Constitution in such a way that the validity of the Pan-European arrest warrant would be recognized in France.
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