Open letter sent by civil rights groups worldwide against the Surveillance Bill to be adopted in France.



Dear Member of the Assemblée Nationale,

The undersigned civil and human rights organisations call on French parliamentarians to reject the draft law on surveillance measures for international electronic communications (Proposition de loi relative aux mesures de surveillance des communications électroniques internationales). The bill fails to defend and protect the right to privacy of individuals worldwide.

With this new bill, parliament is about to approve new disproportionate surveillance measures to monitor international communications. Based on the principle of massive collections of data, the bill seeks to legitimise the civil and human rights abuses revealed by Edward Snowden about the practice of intelligence agencies such as the ones in the US and the UK. As a crucial part of the global Internet traffic goes through French submarine cables, this law would put France in the list of countries with sweeping surveillance capabilities.

This bill follows from the Surveillance Law passed in June, which allows the French government, among other measures, to monitor people’s phone calls and emails without judicial approval; and to install black boxes on internet service providers’ infrastructure to collect metadata on millions of innocent individuals. Earlier this year, the French Constitutional Council struck down one of the provisions of the Surveillance bill, and the new proposal seeks to re-authorise the international surveillance programme impacted. The draft law will be voted on 1 October by the French National Assembly.

In particular, we are deeply concerned that: