Le gouvernement ne chôme pas quand il s’agit de limiter les libertés de ses citoyens, et l’Enemy Expatriation Act est une étape dans la direction suivie depuis la dernière décennie aux Etats-Unis.
Un article de Pierre-Yves Saint-Onge de Montréal, Québec.
Le gouvernement ne chôme pas quand il s’agit de limiter les libertés de ses citoyens, et ce nouveau projet de loi est une étape dans la direction suivie depuis la dernière décennie.
Qu’est-ce que ce projet de loi dans les faits : il permettra au gouvernement américain d’enlever la citoyenneté à ses sujets dont il juge que ses activités sont contraires à l’intérêt national. Il a été proposé récemment par le Républicain Charles Dent et le Démocrate Joe Lieberman.
Selon le magazine American Thinker:
“Introduced as S. 1698 in the Senate and as H.R. 3166 in the House of Representatives, the Enemy Expatriation Act is expressly designed to ‘add engaging or supporting hostilities against the United States to the list of acts for which United States nationals would lose their nationality.’
“These bills are inconsistent with current law and Supreme Court precedent. They appear to be tailored to cow the American people, without regard for the 14th-Amendment guarantee prohibiting Congress from divesting an American citizen of his citizenship.
“On their face, S. 1698 and H.R. 3166 make it appear that any citizen ‘engaging in, or purposefully and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States’ would lose his citizenship. This is unlike current law, which also requires proof that the citizen does so ‘with the intention of relinquishing United States nationality.’ Thus, the new bills would make it much easier for the government to strip a dissenting citizen of his citizenship.
“Six of the seven expatriating acts in the current law require proof of formal actions — either a direct renunciation of citizenship, or a similar act unmistakably demonstrating a change of allegiance to another country. These bills would require neither. Rather, they describe a newly minted offense, the commission of which may give rise to the inference of an intent to renounce citizenship, but without requiring any direct evidence of such an intent.
“To be sure, current law provides that the commission of treason or other serious acts may justify an inference of renunciation of citizenship. However, before such an inference can be made, the person previously must have been convicted beyond a reasonable doubt of one or more specified criminal acts. Under the proposed bills, the government could take away a person’s citizenship in a civil action without that person having been previously convicted of a crime in a court governed by traditional procedural safeguards of trial by jury, confrontation of witnesses, and proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Et pour ceux qui croient qu’une telle loi ne passerait pas… je pointe dans la direction du Trading with the Enemy Act qui a été mis en place durant la Première Guerre Mondiale pour censurer la liberté d’expression, et qui permettait à l’État d’emprisonner les citoyens qui exprimaient leurs doutes quant à la guerre.
H.L. Mencken a déjà dit: “It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume… that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions.”
On finira sur petite touche d’humour…
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