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The court of appeal in Amiens has just delivered an interesting order on a delicate point of law. The facts were as follows: after four days of debate before the criminal court of the Somme, when the judge and jury had withdrawn to deliberate, a journalist covering the case for a television channel noticed that the deliberation room was reflected in the glass building opposite. The journalist in question took the initiative of filming this reflection, thereby making it possible to view the deliberation process (which is theoretically secret) and more particularly two members of the jury voting...

The bill - examined at length and copiously amended at its first reading in the National Assembly and the Senate - passed through the joint mixed committee at the end of January. As a result of this examination, provided for in the urgent procedure adopted by the Government for passing the Act, the bill was ratified in the form it was submitted to the global vote of each assembly in the course of the following days. The package was finally adopted on 4 February 2009. Two types of appeal have already been lodged against the texts adopted. Firstly, opposition members of the Senate have called on...

The bills for reforming the public-sector audiovisual scene have provoked stormy discussions in the National Assembly. Being fewer in number, the opposition MPs firmly opposed to the bill as prepared and drafted by the parliamentary majority had no choice but to table hundreds of amendments in order to delay voting, hoping thereby to cause the reform to fail. In view of the delay caused by examination of the bill in the National Assembly, the Government made the surprising decision not to wait for Parliament’s vote before applying the key measure in the reform - the abolition of advertising. The...

The 2009 Finance Act has created a new tax incentive aimed at attracting foreign productions and co-productions to France. Directed at both cinema and audiovisual works, the arrangement will be to the advantage of executive producers liable for French company tax for their fictional and animated works meeting three cumulative conditions: they must be ineligible for financial support for production, their dramatic content must include elements relating to French culture, heritage or territory, and they must have eligible expenditure of at least EUR one million euro; for fictional works there is...

Grégory Lemarchal was a singer who became famous both for winning a reality TV programme and for the disease that killed him - despite the doubts expressed for a long time as to its nature - cystic fibrosis. During one of his sketches, a humorous commentator on a television programme who habitually renames celebrities by referring to them by a word that is supposed to sum them up chose “cystic fibrosis” to refer to Gregory Lemarchal, using the name of the disease in place of the name of the person each time it came up in a phrase. The commentator was prosecuted on the basis of a totally new infringement...