AP News, July 8th, 2007
President Nicolas Sarkozy said he will not offer mass pardons to France's prisoners on Bastille Day, keeping up his law-and-order reputation and breaking with tradition.
Sarkozy said in an interview published Sunday he had been presented with a decree proposing the release of 3,000 prisoners on the July 14 holiday, which commemorates the 1789 storming of the Bastille prison in Paris by angry crowds. The event started the revolution that rid France of its monarchy.
"There will be no mass pardon," Sarkozy told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper, confirming a pledge he made during his presidential campaign this spring.
Sarkozy's predecessor, Jacques Chirac, and previous leaders had used the pardons to relieve chronic overcrowding in French prisons.
"Since when has the right to pardon served as a way to manage prisons?" Sarkozy said.
Prisoners' rights groups and prison guards had supported the mass pardons, which excluded several categories of violent or dangerous inmates.
Sarkozy, who took office May 16, said he would grant pardons on a case-by-case basis for "humanitarian or exceptional reasons."
"Someone jumps in the Seine River, and saves three drowning children. It turns out he has a criminal record. The presidential pardon could play a role here," he said.
Chirac came under fire for using presidential pardons for personal reasons when he cleared his friend and former athlete Guy Drut of corruption charges last year.
France's prisons house nearly 61,000 prisoners but were built to take only 50,000 inmates.
Prison officers have expressed concern about a backlash by inmates expecting a pardon, and a new crush of inmates because of a draft law championed by Sarkozy imposing minimum sentences for repeat offenders.
The leader of the opposition Socialist Party, Francois Hollande, called for an immediate boost in prison funding, and urged alternatives to prisons for those convicted of minor violations.
"We are heading toward very big tensions (in prison populations), and therefore we must immediately release the necessary funds," he said Sunday evening on Radio-J.
Gabrielle Mouesca, a former inmate and president of the French section of the International Observatory of Prisons, denounced conditions in the nation's jails, saying on RTL radio that Sarkozy's decision "risks becoming the spark that will set French prisons ablaze."
