Freedom and safety in a dangerous world

The French law of February 25, 2008 institutes "rétention de sureté", which allows convicts to be kept in detention after serving their sentence, depriving them of their liberty for a period of one year, renewable indefinitely, on the grounds of "dangerousness". Prepared for in recent years by a succession of laws on recidivism, the break with the retributive function is thus enshrined, at the risk of dehumanizing criminal law. How did we get here? The answer cannot be reduced to the Franco-French debate between the repressive right and the permissive left. In view of the convergent evolution of other systems, both in comparative law and in European and international law, we will put forward the hypothesis of an indirect effect of the September 11, 2001 attacks, which in a way freed political leaders, symbolically and legally, from the obligation to respect the limits inherent in the rule of law, and thus triggered, through a series of shockwaves, movements that are all the more difficult to control as they remain hidden behind arguments of domestic law. Over and above its purely national aspects, the issue is one of interdependence, which lies at the heart of the internationalization of law. In the face of very real dangers to individuals, States and even the planet, the tangle of normative spaces (national, European and global) undoubtedly contributes to the uncertainty of responses. Whether it's a question of transformations in social control, changes in the rule of law or fluctuations in world order, it encourages both drift and resistance, problems and solutions.