France bans the publication of statistical information about judges’ decisions
artificiallawyer.com
artificiallawyer.com
I’m totally flabbergasted at how public domain is now not only censored, but sharing of it is punishable by prison time...
>This seems to be like giving someone access to a public library, but banning them from reading certain books that are sitting right there on the shelf for all to see. This is a sort of coercive censorship, but of the most bizarre kind – as it’s the censorship of justice’s own output.
The phrasing of the law is more close to being allowed to read important books about historical events, but you are forbidden to summarize or think about the conclusions of said events and share your findings. I can’t seem to think of another way to rationalize those who approved this into law other than the judges simply didn’t like the public knowing ‘how they think’. What a truly bizarre verdict.
Think about politicians: "You have no right to use my personally identifiable data to accuse me of bribery!"
If you are acting officially on behalf of the state I have the moral right, whether the law says so or not, to scrutinize your decisions.
France clearly disagrees.
I think that's misguided on France's part, but it's not "censorship" per se.
This French law still leaves court papers conveniently accessible, it seems, to anyone with a browser. Anyone, working alone or in a team, can still analyze particular judges' tendencies, just not with automated help. So your conclusion "you are forbidden to summarize or think about the conclusions of said events and share your findings" doesn't quite hold. Since the volume of these papers is so huge, the law forces you to be motivated to focus on and analyze a particular judge or type of case or court system ... the cost isn't justifiable otherwise. It's kind of a de facto "warrant" system ... if you really want to search for weird judicial behavior you need to pay the price. In that light the French law isn't any more unreasonable than the U.S. public records review example.
Edit: grammar.
Even the most appalling wrongdoings have no consequences on judges. Like the judge instructing the Outreau case (an alleged poedophile ring that resulted in dozens of people sent to jail and/or loosing custody of their children, before the whole case collapsed when it became clear the only evidence was the false testimony of a single person). The judge responsible faced a parliamentary hearing, where he appeared unfit for the job, incapable of even speaking in public. As far as I am aware it didn't even dent his career. Or the Nice court affair, where the president of the court was caught tipping off a gangster from his freemason lodge. The judge was quietly sent to retirement and never saw the bars of a jail.
Judges in France are highly politicized, as the "mur des cons" scandal illustrated. There is a long tradition of judges prosecuting a political party before resigning to take a senior position in a competing party (Thierry Jean-Pierre, Eva Joly, Eric Halphen, etc).
It is therefore unsurprising to see some law trying to prevent surfacing any evidence of partiality and/or wrong doing.
this can't be for real.
when did France become so conservative?
You have to understand that France has some other traits that are way more progressive than in the US: crossing the street is not a crime, you won't be arrested for drinking in the street, women work more than in the US, and they get married less, birth control and abortions are covered by insurance.
The balance is different than in the US, but people have a longer life expectancy with a way lower GDP/capita, so something is seriously right.
It is illegal to try to criticise a court decision in a way that is designed to impede the justice system and/or to interfere with the independence of the judiciary.
That means you can't say it. You might be able to say it, depending on who you upset.
It's okay to criticise a court decision if you just don't agree with it, but not to say "see this judgments? it shows all judges are corrupted".
Contempt of Court is the law in lots of countries, not just France.
> « Les données d'identité des magistrats et des membres du greffe ne peuvent faire l'objet d'une réutilisation ayant pour objet ou pour effet d'évaluer, d'analyser, de comparer ou de prédire leurs pratiques professionnelles réelles ou supposées. La violation de cette interdiction est punie des peines prévues aux articles 226-18,226-24 et 226-31 du code pénal, sans préjudice des mesures et sanctions prévues par la loi n° 78-17 du 6 janvier 1978 relative à l'informatique, aux fichiers et aux libertés. » ;
Which translates roughly to:
> The identity data of magistrates and members of the greffe can not be re-used for the purpose or effect of evaluating, analyzing, comparing or predicting their actual or alleged professional practices. Violation of this prohibition is punished by the penalties provided for in Articles 226-18,226-24 and 226-31 of the Penal Code, without prejudice to the measures and sanctions provided for by Law No. 78-17 of 6 January 1978 relating to data processing, files and freedoms
You know, cause a non-French entity is outside of France's jurisdiction.
There’s a law in France regardiung the release of exit polls on the day of an election - basically, you are restricted from releasing these polls before the polls close so as not to impact people who vote later in the day. The law applies to French media in France, but it doesn’t apply to non-French media entities. Hence, if you are looking for exit polling date on the day of the election, you hit up a French-language source in Switzerland or Belgium that carries the polling instead of the local French news site.
I suspect this legal analysis could be a more lucrative and sustainable use case for a non-French-but-still-French-language startup to make their way.
Source:
https://www.thelocal.fr/20181220/french-ban-on-dna-testing-c...
https://www.ibdna.com/paternity-testing-ban-upheld-in-france...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_paternity_testing#France
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/french-men-s-insecurity-over...
Private paternity testing is illegal. If there is contestation of paternity or a legal dispute, a judge can and will mandate a test.
Felony paternity testing...I have no words.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that this law inhibits laboratories outside of France in doing business in France.
And DNA testing seems too easy to me to be prohibited. We shed DNA all the time and it is becoming easier and easier to run PCRs or even sequence genomes.
Of course, the legal issue is with the invasion of privacy, and potential harm to the children's psyche, so there is actually some justification.
On the other hand, if you're going to extract payment, you should probably have to provide evidence that payment is due.
What about the potential harm to the psyche of a husband who doesn't know if he is the father of some children?
Children are generally granted more protections. Not sure how to complain about that without sounding weak and immature.
(Not sure if this is the case I was thinking of, but it popped up with a minute's searching: https://nationalpost.com/news/world/texas-man-ordered-to-pay... )
What's unusual (and newsworthy) in that specific case is that the child was a teenager by the time the paternity test happened, and Texas law doesn't remove any child support obligations imposed prior to the test. I believe that man was still contesting the outcome.
If anything, this is a great example of how important paternity tests can be. And why the U.S. should not outlaw paternity tests.
https://lawandcrime.com/video/man-legally-forced-to-pay-chil...
https://5newsonline.com/2017/01/12/oklahoma-man-ordered-to-p...
From wikipedia regarding François Mitterrand [0]: He also had two children as results of extra-marital affairs: an acknowledged daughter, Mazarine (born 1974), with his mistress Anne Pingeot, and an unacknowledged son, Hravn Forsne (born 1988), with Swedish journalist Christina Forsne.
And to get a court mandate in such cases where you think the child might not be yours you must basically "prove" the mother had to opportunity to cheat on you and that it could have resulted in the conception, and even then it may not exempt you from paying child support if you are listed as the father on the birth certificate you may only be able to claim them back from the biological father if you ever find him.
Another issue to me is that they must have provided the DNA of their child to a private entity (probably without telling the mother either) and I'm not sure I like that.
Initiate a divorce?
The person is not "supposed to do" anything. It's the norm to let people make free, unrestricted choices as long as all parties involved consent. You generally need a good reason to restrict these activities in Western culture.
>Another issue to me is that they must have provided the DNA of their child to a private entity (probably without telling the mother either) and I'm not sure I like that.
In most countries parents are allowed to do all these things. Why change parental rights merely in the case of paternity tests?
Why? If you have doubts, then the DNA test will be ordered in the divorce proceedings.
Maybe you want to figure out if the child is genetically yours before you initiate divorce.
> consensual activity
> all parties involved consent
Well that's the crux of it, indeed. Most private testing is not done in a consensual way because that would require the assent of the child, which is likely minor, meaning it requires the assent of both its legal parents. If you have the assent of both the father and mother, it's easy (and free) to ask a court to allow the testing.
It would be very interesting if we defined the concept of parents as being the adults with closest social link with the child. The idea of child support as being something imposed would then go away, as child support is generally only contested in the case when the adult have no social link with the child and thus no involvement beyond paying the bill.
It would also make same-sex relations identical to other relations as the law would not care about which adults have closest social link with the child. Marriage vs Cohabitation would also be a area which the law could ignore, and the concept of society taking care of children in need would become natural as there will always be two adults that is the closest social link, even if some of those are paid by the state.
The current system has a lot of costs and drawbacks. Using the marriage as the norm has caused a lot of issue here in Sweden and the system is currently being tweaked every year to account for a changing culture. 1/3 of couples with children live as cohabitation rather than registered/marriage. Family law has to keep up. Same-sex families with children is an other area which is growing and the law has seen updated several times the last 10 years.
Rather than having laws getting tweaked and warped each year to account for a changing culture, maybe it is time to address it from a different perspective. If a child treat the adults around them as their parents, the adult treat the child as their child, and social environment around them treat the adults as the parents of the child, then why not also have the law treat them as the parents of the child? Outside of medicine does the DNA then really matter?
Paternity is clearly and demonstrably a biological concept. You can easily see this when pondering the idea of having sex with your parent, and the possibility of amplifying congenital birth defects. Note that if a child is misled about his or her biological father, the probability of incest increases.
Be that as it may, paternity is one of the most important and impactful relationship humans have, many social rules, taboos and rituals have evolved around it, marriage being one.
Paternity is a social construct.
There are cultures where paternity simply is not important. In a matriachal society, a person's mother's brother is apt to be more important than a biological father, sometime to the point of not knowing who the father is (because it is unimportant).
https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/the-mosuo-mat...
Royal intermarriage has been practiced by ruling dynasties since times immemorial. It had often been observed that this leads to problems and infertility, and indeed this is the root cause for the incest taboos that you find in varying forms and shapes in most cultures and religions. However, it has only been with the rise of modern biology and genetics in the 20th century, that this practice was abandoned.
Speaking of Ancient Rome, it has been speculated that the decline of the Roman Empire was in parts caused by the failure of the ruling families to produce enough children. Naturally, we don't have enough information today to confirm or disprove such speculation.
I have no idea why you link to an article about the Mosuo. It has no bearing on the biological nature of paternity.
The fact that most notions of paternity are almost universal means that there is something fundamental driving this which can only be overridden in a handful of cultures. Perhaps there is some instinctual male drive to be more invested in their genetic offspring. Investing in their own genetic offspring increases their biological fitness and makes them more likely to pass on their traits of favoritism. Perhaps in cultures that don't have these widely held traditions around paternity aren't able to secure paternal investment and encourage long term monogamous relationships, which leads to the culture's destruction, degeneration, or stagnation.
as well as a social construct.
This is slightly misleading since the basic biological facts of reproduction have not been modifiable so far in human history. Reproduction has always needed a fertile man and a fertile women having sexual intercourse. (Note this may change in the future with technological advancement, e.g. cloning and artificial wombs.) In contrast, the social aspects of reproduction have been varying a great deal on the surface.
I'd rather say that the social rules, rituals, taboos, institutions, all emerge and stabilise in order to give structure to and make predictable the underlying biological facts of reproduction. Note that reproduction is humanity's the single most important task.
Giving predictable, teachable and learnable social structure to reproduction has been all the more important before humanity started worked out how reproduction works and began to be able to control it at will (genetics, contraception etc). It is not surprising that there is a great deal of surface variety of social overgrowth on top of the basal biology, since genetics is rather complicated (and not fully understood as of June 2019, e.g. epigenetics) and has a lot of randomness built in. Moreover, reproduction, being the single most important task of humanity, intersects with all manner of other social institutions. This has encouraged the ad-hoc theorising, and overfitting on anecdotes that became enshrined as social institutions.
Summary: the social aspects of reproduction have been humanity's attempts to understand, manage and control reproduction, and are a reaction to the biological complexities of reproduction.
Sure people have a myriad of views on how family works, but that's the frame of law.
For instance if you raised a kid for 15 years, divorce for unrelated reasons (ex: repetitive adultery), but take the opportunity to have paternity checked, are you less of a parent of this kid than his biological father ? I'd suppose there's a variety of answers depending on each one's walk of life.
I'm not a big fan either, but that's how it is for now...
Too late to edit, damn it
Btw. This feels kinda like defending the right to privacy. I thought republic feels strong about freedom of individual... and this seems to be an unnecessary restriction.
* it weakens trust in the institution of marriage
* many men are financially responsible for children they would not be responsible for otherwise
* many men are emotionally invested in children and relationships they might not be invested in otherwise, to the possible detriment of their (generally shaky) mental health before, during, and after divorce
* it reduces the penalties for infidelity, which may have an effect on people's behavior
Infidelity is not illegal either, by the way, there's no penalty for it because the state doesn't have a say in who sleeps with who. Of course it's a cause for divorce though.
In the end, no matter what might happen to the parents, the justice system is all about the interests of the children. It might not always be fair to the father or the mother, but if it's better for the kid then that's how it is.
Moreover, actively tricking somebody into taking on the social obligations of fatherhood, is a dramatic violation of most major moral obligations that humans have. It also violate the child's right to know both parents.
Aside, there is an easy way out of this conundrum: mandatory paternity test at birth.
You only make the appeal to popularity when the public holds the same opinion as you.
> Of course it's a cause for divorce though
If your partner can divorce you for infidelity, that is a penalty that they can selectively enforce. When the state makes it a justification for divorce, the implicit message is that infidelity is bad for marriages. Why, then, would the state want to reduce the penalties for infidelity by making the husband of a cheating wife financially liable regardless of paternity?
>the justice system is all about the interests of the children
If the state cares about the welfare of a child the state can give welfare payments to the mother.
Just because the system is unfair to some parties doesn't mean it's done in the best interest of one party. I don't buy it that the state is motivated here by the welfare of children. Marriage, and more generally being raised by two parents, is quite beneficial to children. If the state acted in accordance with this, you would expect the state to discourage (increase the costs) of divorce rather than encourage it (make it easier or reduce the costs). Here we are seeing the opposite.
Of course the question of doing DNA testing on an unsuspecting minor without their consent or the consent of both their parents is a different kettle of fish.
Thinking the way you do violates the core principle that knowledge can't "have purpose", knowledge of any kind, no matter how trivial is itself the purpose of everything or anything! Violate this and we're back on the train to the dark-ages, bie-bie enlightenment and all the good stuff the benefited humanity ever since... "Knowledge as purpose, not means" has been the core drive of humanity's progress, remove this and all the shiny tech we have can instantly be turned into simply tools of oppression and destruction for profit.
I would argue this is exactly what a government shouldn't be doing. They can continue doing so until enough people get fed up with it and cause a civil unrest. Not the same reasons but things like Brexit and the France protests are all caused because of the people getting fed up of the government.
In a working democracy, like France or UK, or USA, only an idiot thinks of the government as something separated from people.
If you don't like your democratic goverment, it means that you don't like the majority of your compatriots: time to emigrate or try and accept.
Why is it banned?
French doctors have pointed out that as the popularity of these tests has increased, they have seen more patients who are worried about the results.
"We regularly have consultations with people because they had no idea what they were getting in to," Professor Stanislas Lyonnet, director of an institute on genetic diseases told the French press.
"They did a test they thought would be fun but they are often actually receiving crucial and sometimes scientifically sound information."
Lyonnet went on to say that people might find out they are "a carrier of cystic fibrosis, they have a risk of having Huntington's disease, they have a risk of breast cancer or ovarian cancer ... This comes without further information or medical guidance so finding it out from under a Christmas tree is really ridiculous!"
Some have also suggested the reason for the ongoing ban is to "preserve the peace" in French families, with many incidents of people taking the test and discovering information such as that one of their parents isn't actually theirs.
So, please, what's so ridiculous about it?
Just about everything.
"No no no this reality is so frightful, please hide it from everyone"
pathetic.
https://gizmodo.com/how-dna-testing-botched-my-familys-herit...
https://www.livescience.com/63997-dna-ancestry-test-results-...
https://gizmodo.com/i-tried-a-bunch-of-dna-tests-and-all-i-g...
https://gizmodo.com/the-next-pseudoscience-health-craze-is-a...
https://gizmodo.com/another-dna-testing-company-reportedly-g...
Edit: hackernews if full of these articles https://www.google.com/search?q=dna+testing+site%3Anews.ycom...
Also, AI programs in such matters get way too much credit. They is a lot to be done before we should consider using them like that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/26/opinion/algorithm-compas-...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/13/ai-progra...
Another problem is that most of these tools are developed by private companies. Relying on them for judicial decisions pretty much the same as privatizing justice. Especially when said tools are such black boxes
https://www.wired.com/2017/04/courts-using-ai-sentence-crimi...
https://rm.coe.int/ethical-charter-en-for-publication-4-dece...
> Les tiers peuvent se faire délivrer copie des jugements, sous réserve des demandes abusives, en particulier par leur nombre ou par leur caractère répétitif ou systématique.
https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/eli/loi/2019/3/23/2019-222/jo...
(the stupid capitalization doesn't help either)
That capitalization nomenclature is called "Title Case"... typically used for newspaper/article titles. It comes from a time when it was more time consuming (and sometimes impossible) to add emphasis to words in some other way using the typesetter. Newspaper sections were typically ALL CAPS and article titles were Title Case. This allowed for different levels of emphasis using the same character set. It's not really necessary anymore but it lives on out of tradition.
The law specifically state that what is illegal is publishing data identifying a judge ("Les données d'identité des magistrats et des membres du greffe ne peuvent faire l'objet..."), so publishing general or anonymized stats is legal. For stats regarding a judge I guess one would have to rely on the previously available printed format. Why that is I have no idea, the only argument I've seen is some vague reference to protecting againt "judge/lawyer AI", which I can't make sense of in this context (is judge AI even a thing?). This seems to me to be some kind of over-reaction to new tech.
I've come to call these type of laws 'Peak French': unforeseen issue on the horizon? No worries, just lock everything down and pretend the problem is solved.
Moreover, please keep in mind that the french system is quite different from the US/UK. In France, Judges are really tighly controlled by the law. In US/UK they're more "free". So this kind of software has more value in US/UK where the personality of the judge matter more
- you can choose to release partially anonymized data (like without identities of judges etc.), and have laws preventing the use of ML to de-anonymize data statistically (examples of this can be seem with medical data, this can work fine)
- ...you CAN'T have the data available but prevent people from using it
Or did we completely misunderstood what this was about?
Dunno WTF is with this pattern of legislations cropping around the EU (like the copyright directives etc.) that seem the product of what can only be explained by (a) levels of incompetence bordering actual mental-impairment from the part of the legislators, or (b) a really dark agenda being played out behind the scenes (thing Germany cca. 1939-ish...).
This is sad because some of us really love the idea of the EU open society!
It's like there's some dark force trying to destroy it and its countries from within under the guise of "protecting" imaginary "rights".
The article nonchalantly displays bias but it does seem like AI scared French judges about their class job security. If this is the case, more than anything, it validates AI in the judiciary.
This is (rider?) legalese that got lobbed into a larger legislative reform.
https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/eli/loi/2019/3/23/2019-222/jo...
We must never let someone say things like "It's not me that's racist, it was the AI that made the decision!"
If this law is real the story might evolve. People in the law industry will know how to structure an offshore entity that can do the analysis. And people who get the results are going to know how to act like they didn't need the computer.
A challenge through line of EU institutes may well be able to cancel this law.