The Minister of Relations with Parliament, Laurent Panifous, committed on Tuesday June 2 to ensuring that the law on the end of life is definitively adopted in the National Assembly on July 15, and confirmed the government’s desire for the extraordinary session to go beyond mid-July.
If the seven deputies and seven senators who must try to find a compromise on Tuesday, in a joint joint committee, “do not agree, which is probable, then we will convene the text the week of June 22 at the National Assembly,” explained the minister on Sud radio. “He would leave for a few days for a final shuttle, a final return trip to the Senate and we will give the last word to the deputies on July 15,” he certified.
Laurent Panifous recalled that this bill, resulting from a citizens’ convention and creating a new right to assisted dying with multiple conditions, had “for at least four years”, “suffered the vicissitudes of dissolutions, censorships, etc….” The Minister of Relations with Parliament also announced that he would inform the presidents of groups in the Assembly on Tuesday of the holding of an extraordinary session of “three weeks, three and a half weeks”, from July 1.
It is President Emmanuel Macron who has the last word on the extraordinary convocation of Parliament. “I need this time (…) to be able to land all the texts,” insisted Laurent Panifous, referring to the agricultural emergency law, the military programming law, “the everyday security texts” carried by the Minister of the Interior, the law on criminal justice and the protection of minors on social networks. On the other hand, he estimated that, despite the extraordinary session, Corsica’s constitutional reform project and the child protection bill would not have time to pass through the Senate.
The President of the Senate Gérard Larcher had demanded at the end of May that parliamentary work not extend beyond July 14 to allow time for the campaign for the senatorial elections which will be held at the end of September. Laurent Panifous is committed to “ensuring that, after July 14, there are only votes, only conclusions of texts and no new texts that are put up for debate” in the upper house.
