French Civil Liberties groups warned on Tuesday about a law approved recently by the French Constitutional Council to criminalize those people who film and /or broadcast act of violence  being other than professional journalists.

This means that anyone  producing a film of a crime he or she is witnessing,  as well as anyone publishing such images could be immediately jailed.

As highlighted by the magazine Infoworld, this initiative has been disclosed exactly 16 years after that night in  Los Angeles –the night between March3rd and March 4th- when  police officers were filmed by the amateur videographer  George Holliday  while beating   a man - Mr. Rodney King - in the street.

We live in an era in which crimes are often discovered –and criminals persecuted- because of the images caught by accidental witnesses’ cameras but from now on, in France similar initiatives could be punished with up to five years in prison and a fine of $75.000…  that is, the penalty for crime-shooters could be harsher than the one for crime-perpetrators.

French authorities that this initiative was meant as a countermeasure against a wide range of public order offences. Indeed, while debating this law, government representatives asserted that  the offence of filming or distributing films of acts of violence targets "happy slapping", a typical  practice in Bullying in which an unsuspecting victim is attacked while an accomplice records the assault (commonly with a camera phone or a smartphone).

But according to the French association for Liberty of expression on the Internet (Ligue ODEBI),  this law will deliberately criminalize the activities of citizen journalists unrelated to the perpetrators of violent acts  . The Ligue is also worried about the fact that this law and others still being debated, will soon bring about the creation of a sort of “parallel judicial system” to control information-streams on the Internet.

But this is not the only matter of concern for French people indeed, as highlighted by Reporters Without Borders, French government proposed a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, that could be certified as “Government –approved” in case they perform some given duties and keep to some rules. In order to monitor the applicants to the certificate, the Prime Minister will personally nominate the members of an  “ethical commission for online communication services “ whose powers are considered to be too wide-ranging and above all poorly defined.

According to Reporters Without Borders, indeed, a similar system could indirectly lead to censorship because it could push services providers into wrongly censoring their content to protect  the approval of the commission.  

On February 16^th 2007, Reporters Without Borders published a statement   to voice the organization’s concern about  the decree .

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