French lawmakers on Tuesday widely approved a bill that cracks down on illegal drug trafficking by empowering prosecutors, toughening the penalties for traffickers and giving the police more investigative tools.
The move, which paves the way for the measures to become law, was a rare case of successful policymaking in France’s lower house of Parliament, the National Assembly. Lawmakers there have been hobbled by political fractures, but they have joined to express growing concern over the far-reaching impact of crime and violence tied to the drug trade.
The National Assembly approved the bill with 396 votes in favor and 68 against. Its passage was a win for the government of Prime Minister François Bayrou, who survived a no-confidence motion in February to pass a budget but who is still at the mercy of the divided lower house.
“Everyone knows the current political difficulties: no majority in the National Assembly, a complicated path for major bills,” Bruno Retailleau, France’s interior minister, a conservative who championed the bill, told lawmakers on Tuesday.
Mr. Retailleau said that the broad support for the bill showed that lawmakers understood that drug trafficking and organized crime were “often the root cause of hyper-violence” in France and an “existential threat” against its institutions.
Some left-wing lawmakers expressed concern about the focus on cracking down against drug traffickers, rather than the root causes of their trade, but only the hard-left France Unbowed party ultimately voted against the bill. Green lawmakers and a handful of others abstained.
Impetus for the new bill came from an alarming Senate Committee report on drug trafficking that was published last year. It was spearheaded by a Socialist and a member of the conservative Republican Party in a rare instance of collaboration across the aisle.
“The impact of drug trafficking on France has exploded over the past decade,” the report warned. It said that the police were now seizing 10 times as much cocaine as they were a decade ago and that France’s overall drug trade was estimated to be at least 3.5 billion euros, or nearly $4 billion.
Just last week, the police seized a 9.1-metric ton shipment of cannabis resin near Lyon, the Paris prosecutor’s office announced on Tuesday
Shooting and arson attacks on French prisons this month have also heightened a sense that the French authorities are facing an uphill battle against violent crime. The justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, has suggested that the attacks were carried out by drug traffickers to “intimidate” the state, although the identity of those responsible is not yet clear.
The linchpin of France’s new drug trafficking measures, which were inspired in part by Italy’s anti-mafia efforts, is the creation a national prosecutor’s office dedicated to coordinating organized crime cases It is expected to be operational by 2026, and will focus on the most complex and prominent drug-trafficking investigations.
The bill alsomakes it easier to seize the assets of drug traffickers, and allows the police to document some information about investigations — like how a wiretap was conducted — in separate case files that are not accessible to the lawyers of drug-trafficking suspects. That change is intended to avoid leaks that could endanger the lives of investigators or informants, but it has infuriated defense lawyers, who say it violates the right to a fair trial.
The bill also drastically toughens the treatment of inmates regarded as particularly dangerous. It creates special high-security units for the most prominent drug traffickers to minimize outside contact, banning some family visits and using more videoconferencing to reduce the number of in-person court hearings.
Some of the measures seemed tailor-made for one of France’s most notorious criminals, Mohamed Amra. who was freed last year in a ruthless ambush on a prison convoy that left two guards dead on a major highway.
The attack shocked the country and focused attention on violence tied to the drug trade. Mr. Amra, who was taken back into custody in Romania in February after a nine-month manhunt, had juggled cellphones from behind bars to run schemes that included drug trafficking and kidnappings, raising uncomfortable questions about whether the authorities had underestimated him.
The rare critics of the bill just passed in Parliament argued that several of its measures were redundant and that the measure did not give the police the funding needed to tackle complex and time-consuming drug investigations.
“We still believe that this bill will be, for the most part, inefficient,” Ugo Bernalicis, a France Unbowed lawmaker, told the lower house on Tuesday.