The Case of Vincent Lambert: The Prosecutor’s Indictment Against Justice

As reported by Le Figaro journalist Stephane Kovacs, Francois Molins, the public prosecutor at the Court of Cassation, said: “Recognizing the right to life as the highest value in the human rights scale would have the effect of casting doubt on the Leonetti law or laws related to abortion.”

In other words, if we recognize the right to life as the supreme value in the human rights scale, the Leonetti and Veil laws are called into question. But the popular will has approved these laws. Therefore, the right to life cannot be recognized as the supreme value.

The question for Francois Molins is therefore not to know what, objectively, is or is not part of human rights, but what the popular will decides sovereignly about them.

What then is left of the idea that human rights are universal values, intangible, valid always and everywhere? Is it not the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 which states in article 3: “Every individual has the right to life, liberty, and security of person”?

This intervention at least has the merit of showing the profound incoherence inscribed at the very heart of our legislative system, and the absurd tyranny exercised by the majority. French laws—in this case the laws on abortion and end of life—are above basic human rights. Duly noted.

When all is said and done, there remains only one law: the intrinsic relativity of all rights. The only absolute is the so-called popular will, with an elastic rigor according to the times, the moods, and the manipulations that it can undergo. Clever thinking—a relative absolute! That is very useful for absorbing these contradictions into a whole that brings them together.

With such principles, justice no longer has a solid foundation and sinks into arbitrariness.