Proposition 52K1284

Projet de loi abrogeant la loi du 11 avril 1936 permettant au gouvernement d'interdire l'entrée en Belgique de certaines publications étrangères.

General information ¶

Submitted by

The Senate

Submission date

Feb. 28, 2008

Official page

Visit

Status

Adopted

Requirement

Simple

Subjects

press publication publishing legislation

Voting ¶

Voted to adopt

Groen CD&V Vooruit Ecolo LE PS | SP Open Vld N-VA LDD MR VB

Party dissidents ¶

• Hans Bonte (Vooruit) voted to adopt.
• Jan Jambon (N-VA) voted to adopt.

Contact form ¶

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Discussion ¶

Feb. 5, 2009 | Plenary session (Chamber of representatives)

Full source

Mr. Speaker, I will be extremely brief in so far as this bill was considered and voted during a single session of the Justice Committee, on January 20, last year.

This bill aims to abolish the possibility for the government to ban the import of certain foreign publications. It was a law of 1936 which has not been applied for a long time.

The discussions focused on the question of whether the reference to Article 383bis of the Criminal Code, which had been introduced and which said that the law was repealed without prejudice to Article 383bis of the Criminal Code, should be ⁇ ined. In the discussion that followed, each considered that this could cause confusion because there are other laws and other articles, which aim to fight, in particular, against child pornography, which are not repealed and which were not cited.

Finally, an amendment to replace Article 2 was introduced. This amendment was approved, as well as the entire text by twelve votes for and one abstention, that of Vlaams Belang, who considers that if the law is actually obsolete, it would be a bad signal to give to the ideological plane.

April 2, 2009 | Plenary session (Chamber of representatives)

Full source

Mr. Speaker, this is absolutely so. Dear colleagues, today we are passing a law. I have understood that abolishing laws will be an important task for Parliament in the future.

Mr. Speaker, I want to briefly tell you a story about a debate between the committees for Justice of the Chamber and the Senate. One might say that it is generally considered that the present law of 1936, which was last applied in 1972, is clearly superfluous. However, this is not so. At the moment when the parliamentary responsibility to abolish laws is assumed, parliamentarians dive into the history of law and look for the potential risks of the lack of an instrument by abolishing the legal provisions. So we came to a debate with the Senate committee. We had to vote on this a few times.

The Senate and Senate committees feared that with the abolition of the law on dirty booklets, which empowers the government, although after consultation in the Council of Ministers, to stop certain publications at the border and to ban them, one would lose an instrument in the fight against child pornography.

We all know that, above all, the Internet is the outstanding instrument of the global and condemned trade in child pornography. The government and our democracy have the necessary useful preventive tools, like the criminal law policy, to immediately detect, search for and prohibit child pornography and prosecute and condemn the perpetrators.

So we were convinced of the superfluity of the law. This is a small step towards a more coherent and efficient legislation. We all know that the abundance of legislation is often referred to as a cause to say that there is legal uncertainty, that there are procedural layers that can be ⁇ ined and that the process is too slow. It is a small step towards a clearer legislation.

Again, it also requires parliamentary responsibility to dare to engage in the debate on the abolition of laws, because it is not always so obvious.