Question 39220 — crimes, misdemeanors and contraventions

Summary

Mr. Florian Bachelier draws the attention of the Minister of the Economy, Finance and Recovery to the illegal practices of activist and cyber-activist collectives such as Sleeping Giants or the L 214 association, whose methods boil down to putting pressure on companies and certain national media by threatening to destroy their image. This new form of censorship has been prevalent since 2019 on the internet, hitting both the press and more broadly all businesses, is not without consequences. In November 2020, the militant boycott of Sleeping Giants got the better of the company Décathlon, which gave in by withdrawing its advertising funding from a French 24-hour news channel, claiming a refusal to “finance hate speech”. In addition to private channels in the French audiovisual landscape, press magazines also had to make the costs of these pressures. Article 225-2 of the penal code punishes discrimination committed against a natural or legal person with three years' imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros when it consists in particular of "obstructing the normal exercise of any economic activity". However, such methods can have consequences on the jobs of thousands of families if the companies targeted give in to these pressures, preventing themselves from developing freely, prisoners of image blackmail. However, case law considers in this regard that obstruction of the normal exercise of an economic activity can take various forms, for example the call for a prohibited boycott. The Court of Cassation, in its judgment no. 14-88355 of March 30, 2016, specified that discrimination in economic matters “cannot participate in the exercise of freedom of expression, proclaimed by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. In addition, it is appropriate to question the economic interference behind such collectives. It is established that L 214 has benefited since 2017 from American subsidies which have allowed it to acquire notoriety thanks to the Open Philanthropy Project (OPP), a private American company with an advantageous tax regime, created by one of the co-founders of Facebook, and contributed by GAFAM, with the aim of destabilizing the French agro-industrial livestock sectors. He therefore questions the usefulness of modifying the penal code in order to better prevent and punish such inquisitive practices, under the guise of economic interference, which can be described as real obstacles to the principle of freedom of expression, based on the simple disqualification of opinions contrary to their ideological matrix.

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

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