Proposition 53K2430

Projet de loi portant des dispositions fiscales et autres en matière de justice.

General information ¶

Submitted by

PS | SP the Di Rupo government

Submission date

Oct. 2, 2012

Official page

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Status

Adopted

Requirement

Simple

Subjects

tax evasion judicial inquiry public prosecutor's department registration tax public prosecution limitation of legal proceedings

Voting ¶

Voted to adopt

Groen CD&V Vooruit Ecolo LE PS | SP Open Vld MR

Abstained from voting

∉ N-VA LDD

Party dissidents ¶

• Peter Luykx (CD&V) abstained from voting.
• Damien Thiéry (MR) abstained from voting.

Contact form ¶

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Discussion ¶

Dec. 13, 2012 | Plenary session (Chamber of representatives)

Full source

I am referring to my written report.

Mr. Speaker, colleagues, Mrs. Minister, the perpetrators, of course, cannot go free because a case ages, but in criminal cases, especially in tax matters, parties often request additional investigations, only with the intention that the case would aged and that they would escape unpunished. This is of course a problem.

The question is whether the solution you are proposing, and which is now being proposed, is really a solution. With your bill, you wish to suspend the limitation period whenever additional examination is requested. Mrs. Minister, in our opinion this is a measure that again does not really address the causes of the disease, but only the symptoms.

It is necessary to look at the underlying causes of the obsolescence. Usually, the limitations are due to a very slow process, complex and unclear procedures and a lack of researchers, resources or experts, who do not really have an incentive to work quickly, due to the low and very late payments. These things are obvious in tax lawsuits.

Your solution may help to ensure that a case does not age due to the need for further investigation, but it will not stop the parties from stretching the case, through many procedures, anyway. Thus, it will no longer be played out of the prescription, but it will continue to invoke delaying manoeuvres from the beginning, in order to stretch the matter anyway. The process will definitely not be accelerated. The judicial delay will also not be reduced by your proposal. The procedures will become even more complex, with all the risks thereof. This increases the risk of procedural errors.

Yesterday I asked you in the committee about the obsolescence of a drug case in Kortrijk. This case was initiated in 1995. In 2004 the investigation was completed. In 2012, 17 years later, this case is outdated. In your response to my question, you said that action is being taken and that the parquet now works with so-called board tables to closely monitor everything that happens in the procedures.

It is, of course, good that there are board tables, but with the measure now presented in your bill, things will become even more complex. Per ⁇ the parquet will need an additional board table.

What we need are more transparent and simpler procedures, as well as a simpler system, with no exceptions to exceptions. Only in this way can the judicial process be organized more efficiently. With this bill, however, this is not the case. We will therefore abstain from voting on this later.

As a lawyer, I have mixed feelings about the bill.

First and foremost, and for all clarity, one cannot really be against it, not because it is surrounded by a swim of political correctness — that is what my faction has lacked, and on that level we ⁇ do not want to plunge, that everyone knows — but because one for one time leaves victimology to change the criminal law.

I remain cautious, but it is becoming a trend. In fact, every amendment to the Criminal Law has been mainly targeted at the past decades. The perpetrator had to be spared from too much suffering that would be inflicted on him as a sanction for disturbing the social order. So far the emphasis was as little as possible on punishment because according to most political directions, most politically correct directions, too, would be opposed to reintegration.

The slinger seemed at some times even so swung out to the left that the term “punishment” egg had become a taboo. In this regard, I refer to the Basic Law on the internal legal status of detainees. It literally states that the only harm that can be done to a detainee is detention itself. As a result, the concept of prison began more and more to resemble a kind of state hotel where cypriots or guards became butlers or servants.

Let us immediately point out that in many prisons, nevertheless, medieval conditions prevail which are barely compatible with human dignity. I think then first, but ⁇ not only, of the situation of the interned.

We realize too well that there is still a great difference between the almost ideal world of that basic law on the internal legal status of the detainees, with the sometimes world-strange ideas of Professor Dupont underlying it, and the shaking conditions in some prison facilities. Again, that doesn’t take away that the establishment in recent decades has mostly tried to put the perpetrator in the watts and that there has been much too little in proportion to the victims.

In addition to the Basic Law on the Prison Service, a second example is given: messing, brutal strikes and injuries, steaming, racketeering and the like are sometimes punished with what is called alternative punishments, such as planting plants, wood heckling or flower bulb plants.

The most foolish thing I’ve ever had to quote in this regard is the statement of a social worker, who said that such “sanctions” in the head of the perpetrator were indeed severe punishments, because the perpetrator was laughed out when he was confronted with his environment and with the perpetrator group to which he belonged, when they saw him plant flower bulbs, plant plants, plant plants, or wood cutting. I thought it was a punitive sentence. Meanwhile, we know that many of those so-called punishments are not even executed.

Today, however, the legislator wants to show that it is his mind with socially totally unacceptable behavior that is considered by everyone with common sense, and even by the extreme-left side, as discomfort or unwanted or inappropriate behavior. The deliberate infliction of physical suffering on victims who are often defenseless and who have been left in the cold too often over the past decades is now taken seriously. Today the slinger moves again, though only a little bit, to the right, which, of course, we do not find bad.

Colleagues, not only because it is the duty of the opposition to conduct opposition, but also for some fundamental reasons, especially of a technical-legal nature, I ask you, however, to allow me to make some critical considerations to the present bill. I also have mixed feelings, as I mentioned earlier.

What is wrong with the bill?

I repeat that our criticism is not so much politically or ideologically inspired, but above all technically-legal and practical. I explain myself more closely.

I would like to point out briefly that I had already talked about the political correctness with which the present bill has been surrounded too much. I point out my words. The announcement mainly referred to the harsher punishment for violence against homosexuals. This has been almost the starting point, because we have seen in the past period that people with a homosexual orientation in some neighborhoods and cities can hardly come out on the streets without being attacked. On this point, the applicants are especially focused, although the draft law is of course much wider.

It was the colleagues of the N-VA who dared to put the firmly closed politically correct gate on a corner on the level of all that has to do with Islam. The N-VA put the door on a curve, which I appreciate, by talking about immigrants. However, it is your servant here who has consistently pointed to the intolerance of Islam, more specifically to the conduct literally and explicitly put in writing in that religion. Thus, in the course of the last ten to twenty years, the conscious religion can be largely held responsible for the physical siege of other countries by its followers. It must and should be said.

The first requirement for a consistent approach to criminal offences is the courage to name the problem. I continue to regret that a scientist like Marion Van San in this Parliament, a little more than a decade ago, was hunted out in a way of speaking with peek and feathers. The ethno-religious background is undoubtedly overlooked in some criminal acts, while there are often obvious, manifest and clearly explainable causes underlying the fact that an offender targets specific victims. Nevertheless, this step is overlooked — and now it comes — and one goes as if looking into the head of the perpetrator. Was he acting out of homophobia or lesbofobia? Did he act out of an inner disgust for the different coloured or different-looking fellow humans? These questions must now be answered by the judges. Suddenly, all the registers of the anti-discrimination laws adopted at the time are opened. One punishes no longer the facts, but what in the head of the perpetrator would have given rise to the commission of the crime.

Mr. Schoofs, I think you are speaking on the following project. It’s nice, but we’re not talking about that right now!

I suggest you continue. It will be unnecessary to start your speech again. Finish and we will consider that the intervention has taken place. This is not the subject, but continue!

I thank you. That is the best. I thought the discussion was already closed.

As regards the present text, I have pointed out in the committee that one enters a dangerous slope when one wishes to punish the intention underlying the fact rather than the fact itself. As at the time of the adoption of anti-racism and anti-discrimination laws, the penalty liability is no longer dependent on whether a person is related to the victim or acts from a particular social title or position, a public authority or a political mandate.

So from now on, it is up to the judge to look in the perpetrator’s head, to examine his intentions and intentions, and to perform a brain scan to find out what must have occurred in the individual’s head in order to commit certain facts.

Do not misunderstand me, I can understand it. It lies in the human nature, especially in our civilization, to want to refine and nuance things more and more. The only refinement made to date in criminal law was the presence of intention in itself, namely whether a fact was committed intentionally or unintentionally.

Every lawyer or magistrate knows that sometimes it is not sinecure to determine whether a perpetrator has acted intentionally or unintentionally. Now, however, it is going on. They want to get even further into the perpetrator’s head. The question is whether the application of criminal law is beneficial.

I would like to make another critical note to the present bill. It does not come from the intention of the perpetrator, which I just talked about, but from the victim. Criminals and victims are two sides of the same coin. When the criminal law takes curves in view of the perpetrator, it must automatically do so also in view of the victim.

Certain categories of persons will be measured with a specific quality from now on. For example, those who are homosexual, elderly or disabled, may rely on the fact that those who commit a crime against them will be punished by the band more severely than was so far the case. Some victims are by definition special from now on. There will be punishment when a crime is committed against them. This is positive discrimination. However, I remind you, colleagues, that positive discrimination is also discrimination.

I have a few questions here. Will the compensation awarded on a civil level be adjusted by some judges in favor of such a special victim? I am especially concerned with moral compensation.

Is this what we want: merely a heavier punishment or compensation for the perpetrator due to the nature and specificity of the victim? Can the victim refuse to take into account his or her particular orientation or qualitate qua?

I will give an example to clarify. Suppose a perpetrator has beaten his victim because the latter is homosexual. Is the victim then obliged to accept before the court that the perpetrator is being punished harder, while the victim does not want to talk about the orientation in the criminal process at all?

What about the next casus? Forgive me for the political incorrectness. A murderer attacks two victims and beats them together. One victim is a gay black Jew of Moroccan origin with a haze lip and the other victim is a white figure from the middle class. The former leaves the facts with a blue eye and the second with a broken eye, a broken nose and a broken arm. Should the perpetrator now be punished more severely for the acts he committed with respect to person A, with rather mild consequences, or for the acts committed with respect to person B, who suffered much more severely from the crime?

Colleagues, in fact, today the proverbial blind cloth of Mrs. Justice is being brought down, resulting in inequality among the victims. We already make laws for football arbitrators, for cypriots, for gays, for bus drivers and for police officers. These are all specific laws for certain social categories, but the question is whether that sets soden on the dive.

The key word in the whole discussion and the concept underlying the legislative initiative is that it is a “signal”. The current legislation is signal legislation. As a lawyer, I have my own opinion on this, but only in high exceptions, signal legislation may be useful. The signal, however, which must come from the preceding text, does not reach those for whom it is intended. They will not commit a crime less because of this, and it will not be less severe.

The signal, unfortunately, will miss its purpose, because the laxity and impunity will continue unshortedly their nefaste influence throughout the tissue of our society. The laxity of too soft punishments and the impunity due to their non-execution result in the fact that, with legislation, one cannot even put a deck in a pack of butter. It may all be well intended, but the legislator wants to act in these as a kind of lighthouse that emits a light beam. However, the ship of efficient punishment and correct execution of punishment, which must be launched, has long been stuck on the sandbank of lack of strike force in the execution of punishment.

I ⁇ do not want to make the matter ridiculous, colleagues, but I would like to outline how difficult it is in fact.

This brings me back to the essence of everything that has to do with criminal law, criminal action and punishment enforcement in the Belgian legal system that has become ineffective. Such laws would not be needed or approved if there were sufficient resources to prevent criminal offences, persecute committed offences consistently and then effectively punish them. That is lacking today.

Because of the good and honourable intentions underlying this, the Flemish Belang will indeed vote for the bill, because a vote against would ⁇ give the impression that we disregard the concerns of many here in the hemisphere. However, I will personally abstain, colleagues, for the critical technical-legal comments I have just made in my speech.

Mr. Speaker, for the sake of clarity, my argument does not indeed refer to various provisions on taxation but rather to the penalty liability.

I would like to invite you to take the action that has been made by Mr. Schoofs concerns the next item on the agenda, namely Bill No. 2473.