Pavel Durov has been indicted in France in front of an investigative judge, he is released from custody on a 5 million euros bail and is forbidden from leaving France during the investigation.
> Similarly, in Civil law jurisdictions (those that take traditions from the French) judges regularly rely on past rulings by respected judges.
You are indeed correct in most of your comment. But in France while it's true that judges read decisions by other judges, they will never ever quote another judge (except the ECHR). If for instance the Court de cassation (One of the French three (or four, or five, depends on how you count them) Supreme Courts) has said that "X has to be interpreted as Y". Lower judges will start using the sentence directly lifted from the Court de cassation decision "X should be interpreted as Y", but without quotation marks or any sort of attribution. It's a fiction that the judge came up with this interpretation by himself. Sometimes the judge will use some sort of caveat like "Il est constant que" ("It is always the case that") which is a way of saying that he is looking at precedent, without saying it explicitly.
If a judge did quote directly the Court de cassation with attribution, his decision could be appealed and be overthrown by the Court de cassation itself.
And if a judge disagrees with our Supreme Court, he will oftentimes without any hesitation "enter in resistance" (issuing decisions that go against the Court de cassation interpretation), the idea is that this is the way judges try to get the Supreme Court to change its opinion. This is also possible because he have more or less 90 judges in the Court de cassation, and turnover is quite high, so if a decision was only one or two votes in a direction (which no one knows because the votes are secret and the ratio of yays and nays also is secret), in a year, a judge or two at the court may change and the position could change.
My conclusion would be that in France we do respect precedent most of the time... but only if the judge agree with it. Our judges have a natural inclination to ignore precedent. Meanwhile in Common law countries, there is a natural inclination ot respect it... but sometimes judges disagree.
Caveat : In France, decisions by the Constitutional Council (the "Higher" Supreme Court... the Court of cassation would disagree on the "Higher" part) do create binding precedent... because those decision can change directly the text of the law. If the Council says that a sentence in a law is unconstitutional. Then the sentence is stripped out of the Code itself. Lower judges cannot therefore ignore it.
The French gov can only give prosecutors general instruction and those have to be written down. Oral instructions and individual instructions (prosecute that case, drop that other one) are forbidden.
A prosecutor can still try to please the government, by doing things he thinks the gov will like, but if he receive an instruction on that matter... that would be quite a bit scandalous.
Anyway... the National Prosecutor for Financial Affairs has shown that she is quite feisty. She goes after a lot of people with a lot of power. With or without gov. aproval.
Sales office or not, the important aspect of this raid is to gather business data, not technical data. And emails are probably the most important thing they are after.
>this can happen in France given the way in which laws are prosecuted,
I am a French lawyer.
So I have to disagree. This is not the case here. The prosecutors are plainly saying that Google did something outright illegal by misinterpreting on purpose a clause in the French Irish tax convention.
According to the prosecutors in this case Google used a clause sheltering pure advertisement and research subsidiaries of Irish companies from having to pay French tax. But this clause is clearly intended to protect subsidiaries doing market research and advertising a product in advance of actually selling it in France (And also for subsidiaries doing purely informative business (tech support, warranty management etc.) and pure research).
So Google is saying that they do advertisement, so that this clause apply to them, but a reading of the part of the convention that was made public by the prosecutors, clearly show that this is apparently wrong. But the fact that I still haven't found the full convention is a huge caveat :).
So most of developed countries would have enough to prosecute.
Disclosure : French law is my field of work but I only have knowledge of this case by the media (which is terrible in legal matters in France, really, worse than the US sometimes).
It seems that the prosecutors are using a small clause in the French Irish tax treaty saying that the taxation rules applying to a corporation officially incorporated in Ireland are different (implying much higher than the Irish 12.5%), if this corporation has a "stable establishment" in France. The prosecutor is arguing that this applies to Google, so that paying only the Irish 12.5% was illegal.
So no, they are not being accused of using legal methods to minimise their tax bills.
The main problem is actually a even more complicated. It rests on the understanding of the wording of the convention relating to the words "Fixed installation of affairs used only for purposes of advertising (...)" (those are exempted from the "stable establishment" exemption).Google argues that their advertising business makes them exempt to it. Meanwhile French prosecutors argue this clause is intended for companies advertising their own products (imagine Tesla having an agency in France advertising the Tesla cars because they intend to open a point of sale in France, but not selling them yet), not the actual sale of advertisement space like Google do.
And frankly when reading the elements of the convention the Prosecutors have made public... they seem to have a pretty solid ground.
PS : Yay at last, being a tech fan with french legal background is useful !
Thanks Kell - I must ask - did Google ever approach the French Revenue Authorities and try to get a ruling ahead of time? I assume they are arguing that Google does not have a permanent establishment in France.
> Edit: Remembered one more: Juries deciding whether murderers are guilty or not. Simply unthinkable over here. Ironically the horror of this scenario is fuelled by the US/Hollywood itself.
Maybe not in Germany, but France has juries for murder case since 1810, actually, a jury is theoretically mandatory for any case where a sentence of more than 10 years in prison is possible. The accused cannot waive this "right" like in some cases in the US.
(in practice, because juries take a lot of court time, are shaky and difficult to manage, prosecutors often will prosecute a serious crime like a less serious similar one to avoid having to go in front of a jury (e.g. instead of prosecuting something as rape, do it as if it was sexual assault). The prosecutor must have the agreement of the victim and the accused to do it).
Also, it's not only France. Austria, Greece, Italy, Belgium and others have that sort of jury.
These are HID devices, because they need to do challenge/response with the website that's trying to authenticate. The old OTP YubiKeys were keyboards. Better than nothing but phishable.
So what are you proposing in this case, that the original poster had kept the Wikipedia title? Or that the linked Wikipedia article shouldn't have been posted at all ?
Because hn's anti editorialization policy is useless in both cases. For, in the first case, without editorialization, the title is completely useless except for experts on the subject. And for the second case, it has nothing to do with title editorialization, but with content.
