French criminal code

The Penal Code project began with the work of a commission created by President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in a decree issued on November 8, 1974.

The definitive draft of Book I (General Provisions), heavily criticised by the criminal justice community, was rejected by the Élysée Palace on February 22, 1980.

[1] After government changed hands in the 1981 presidential election, Robert Badinter, a former criminal lawyer who had become Minister of Justice, returned to the idea of penal code reform.

[10] In response to the Paris attacks of January 2015, the French legislature passed a law on 24 July 2015 improving the capabilities of the government to gather and act on intelligence in certain areas, and created a new agency, the Committee for Oversight of Intelligence Gathering Techniques [fr] (Commission nationale de contrôle des techniques de renseignement, CNCTR) to oversee it.

[11][12] The 2015 law added to the concept of the Fundamental Interests of the Nation, measures which allow intelligence agencies to gather data for areas within the scope defined.

There has been pushback from civil liberties groups that the powers are ill-defined, and too broad to fit within European guidelines and too vague to be able to determine what is covered by the law.