Four questions on the possible creation of a France-Palestine friendship group at the Assembly
Should we create a France-Palestine friendship group in the National Assembly? This is the question which was submitted on Wednesday May 15 to the Palais-Bourbon office, as revealed by franceinfo on April 27. If there already exists a study group with an international vocation on Palestine, some deputies are pushing to transform it into a friendship group, for symbolic and political reasons. Others are opposed to it, in a tense national and international context since the October 7 attack in Israel. However, these friendship groups have a very supervised role.
Friendship groups were created in 1959 at the National Assembly to bring together elected officials interested in different countries. These groups are transpartisan and are composed on a voluntary basis, without limit of number, according to the interests or affinities of elected officials for this or that country. In the Senate, the same system exists, with 81 interparliamentary friendship groups responsible for “bilateral cooperation between Parliaments”. In the Assembly, there are 146 friendship groups.
The Palais-Bourbon regulations specify that their objective is to “building links between French and foreign parliamentarians” and to be “actors of France’s foreign policy and instruments of the international influence of the National Assembly”.
These friendship groups “play a important role in what we call parliamentary diplomacy”, explains historian Jean Garrigues. It is mainly about “form links with their parliamentary counterparts abroad, through fact-finding missions to these countries and receptions in France, which allow them to obtain information in complete independence”, explains the president of the Parliamentary and Political History Committee. These activities may result in the drafting of public information reports.
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- Source of information and images “francetvinfo“
