Emmanuel Macron pays tribute to Gisèle Halimi and announces that he wants to include abortion in the Constitution

It was in the First Chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal, where lawyers traditionally take the oath, that Emmanuel Macron paid a national tribute to Gisèle Halimi on Wednesday March 8, on the occasion of International Human Rights Day. women. In line with the fights for the right to abortion led by the famous feminist lawyer, who died in July 2020 at the age of 93, the President of the Republic announced the presentation “in the coming months” of one ” law Project “ to enshrine voluntary termination of pregnancy (IVG) in the Constitution.

Emmanuel Macron thus paved the way for a “constitutionalization” abortion, a request made for a long time by feminist associations. In recent weeks, another parliamentary procedure was underway on the subject: the Senate, with a right-wing majority, had adopted, on 1^er February, a proposed constitutional law which enshrined the use of abortion as a component of “women’s freedom”. On November 24, the National Assembly also adopted this text at first reading, but with a different formula.. She opted for a “right to abortion”, ie a positive obligation for the State to guarantee it. If the two chambers managed to agree on second reading, the text should, according to article 89 of the Constitution, be submitted to a referendum.

The fact that Emmanuel Macron chooses to table a constitutional bill makes it possible to avoid a referendum, a politically delicate procedure, because the right to abortion is relatively consensual to date. If a vote on the text in identical terms by the two chambers is indeed required, the President of the Republic can then decide to submit it to Congress – the meeting of the Assembly and the Senate -, the text then having to obtain a majority of three-fifths to pass.

Gisèle Halimi’s “pantheonization” project “in progress”

During the tribute to Gisèle Halimi, Emmanuel Macron underlined the lawyer’s constant commitment to women’s rights. He also reported on his fights against colonization. “She carried the cause of Algerian independence. She was the prosecutor of what the French authorities of the time were doing the way they were doing it”noted the Head of State, in the presence of his predecessor François Hollande, the highest judicial authorities of the country and ministers or former ministers, recalling Gisèle Halimi’s fight against torture in Algeria.

“If today the Algerian war has left the courtrooms, it must now take its full place in our memory here in France and also in Algeria”, continued the President of the Republic, without commenting on a possible entry into the Pantheon of the activist. This entry into the temple of the figures of the Republic, from Jean Moulin to Simone Veil, was recommended by the historian Benjamin Stora among the avenues likely to seal the reconciliation of memories between France and Algeria and within French society but it is seen with a very bad eye on the right and the extreme right of the political spectrum. The study of the file is always ” in progress “however, assured the Elysée in the face of concerns that the national tribute would bury the project of “pantheonization” by Gisele Halimi.

Before Emmanuel Macron, his eldest son, Jean-Yves Halimi, also paid a vibrant tribute to his mother, welcoming his “going down in history”. “You join in the Pantheon of our national story the two Simones, de Beauvoir and Veil, your sisters in the fight and your personal friends”did he declare.

Another of his sons, the journalist Serge Halimi, a left-wing activist and former director of Diplomatic worldboycotted the tributedeploring that he intervenes in full mobilization against a pension reform “extremely unfair”, whom he says his mother fought against. Same boycott for Violaine Lucas, president of the association “Choose the cause of women” co-founded by Gisèle Halimi in 1971, who denounced a “political instrumentalization”. Throughout France, demonstrators marched to defend women’s rights on the occasion of March 8. A day placed under the sign of the fight against pension reform and wage inequality.