30^th Session of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities – 22 to 24 March 2016

Local and Regional democracy in France

Gudrun Mosler-Törnström (Austria, SOC), President of the Congress Chamber of Regions 

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Madam Secretary of State,

Dear Colleagues,

As Mr WIENEN just said, our first monitoring report on local and regional democracy for France since accession to the Charter in 2007, came at a time of great controversy over territorial changes put forward in the “Law on new regional boundaries, regional and departmental elections and modifying the electoral calendar” .

This law was passed on 16 January 2015, just a few months before our visit and regional elections were awaited for December 2015, just ahead of the new regional boundaries coming into effect from 1 January this year.

I don’t need to remind you that the Monitoring Committee received many complaints about this law which reduced the mainland regions from 22 to 13. The complaints mainly pointed to a lack of consultation and these partly informed our questions to the authorities. All of these criticisms were also considered by the delegation and contributed to the conclusion of non-conformity with Article 5 of the Charter.

As this is the nub of our report I would like to quote Article 5:

          Changes in local authority boundaries shall not be made without prior consultation of the local communities concerned, possibly by means of a referendum where this is permitted by statute.

It is clear. Article 5 refers to a specific field of prior consultation of local authorities – changes in boundaries. This article has to be read together with Article 4 concerning the scope of local government, and more particularly its 6th paragraph providing a general right of local authorities to be consulted as a fundamental principle of local self-government.  This is what it says:

This requires local authorities to be provided with a real opportunity for territorial authorities to formulate and articulate their own views and proposals.

Over the years the Congress has debated this question of consultation many times and adopted texts on the subject.  From these it is clear that:

·         consultation is a fundamental legal and democratic practice which aims to contribute to good governance. Here I refer to Congress Recommendation 171 (2005)

·         Mechanisms for consultation should be well-established in the democratic and political relationship between the state and the territorial authorities

·         they should allow local authority opinions to be  taken into account in the formulation of policy and legislation

·         local authorities should be consulted and have an active role in adopting decisions on all matters that concern them  in a manner and timeframe such as to have a real opportunity to articulate their own views and proposals.

You might not be aware of just how much controversy has surrounded the adoption of this new law on the regions.  The Senate – which has a mandate to represent the general interest of territorial authorities – was in strong disagreement with the National Assembly on this law. An accelerated procedure was introduced by the government to break the deadlock in discussions and even a joint committee convened at the end of the procedure did not find an accord between the 2 Houses. 

2 legal procedures were brought– one before the Conseil Constitutionnel, and other before the Conseil d’Etat.  I will not go into these 2 cases here, you have all the argumentation in the report. However I would like to stress that in our opinion, these decisions put into question the status of an international treaty in the French law.

 Where there is such broad discontent the risk is, that unless governments are able to publicise and explain a coherent concept as justification for the changing of boundaries, based on plausible reasons of public interest, disaffected sub-national authorities as well as disaffected citizens may easily lose their trust in democratic institutions. 

The Charter requires consultation with all local / regional communities concerned, especially when the number of affected authorities is rather small and consultation with each one of them is easily practicable – as is the case with the French regions .

The opinions of the senators, who do not represent single territorial entities (ie regions), cannot be regarded as “consultation” as required by the Charter. Nor can their participation in the course of their parliamentary work be characterised as prior consultation in due time and in an appropriate way for the regional authorities as stipulated by the Charter in its Articles 4.6 and 5.

Just a few days ago, we were in contact with some local elected representatives from the south of France who complained about the way the Metropole Aix-Marseille Provence, was created. They complained about the fact that this new structure has been imposed to them without any kind of prior consultation. I have given a rather lengthy explanation of the reasoning by the delegation to reach its opinion of a violation of Article 5 of the Charter by France as regards the new Law on the Regions. But I think you will agree that the amount of polemic stirred up by this subject over the last few months merits this in-depth treatment.

As to our recommendation on this matter we call on the French authorities to:

·         draw up legislation setting out the procedures for consulting local authority representatives to ensure that they are effectively consulted, in due time and in an appropriate manner, on all questions directly concerning those authorities, including a fortiori changes in their boundaries.

Thank you for your attention.