ABSTRACT
To cope with the COVID-19 crisis, the French Parliament adopted on 23 March 2020 Statute Law n°2020-290 creating a new emergency powers regime: the ‘state of health emergency’. This, first, confers important powers and wide discretion on the executive branch and the administrative authorities. Secondly, the state of health emergency enables the executive to severely restrict rights and freedoms with minimal checks and balances. To expose how security-focused the management of COVID-19 was in France, this chapter examines the expansion of exceptional regimes under the guise of the pandemic challenge; the escalation of the executive powers that limit and suspend rights and freedoms; and the lack of any genuinely effective institutional oversight.
