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Complete reference : Frison-Roche, M.-A., Facebook, le coronavirus et la Compliance, Petites Affiches, avril 2020.

Read in prepublication in Actualités Juridiques

Read the Working paper in French and in English

Référence complète : Gelblat, A. et Marguet, L., État d’urgence sanitaire : la doctrine dans tous ses états ?, Revue des droits de l'homme, avril 2020.

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Lire l'article. 

Without any request, on his or her newsfeed, those who surfs on the social network built by Facebook, has found on 23 of March 2020, in the morning, the following message :

« X (prénom de l'internaute), agissez maintenant pour ralentir la propagation du coronavirus (COVID-19) Retrouvez les actualités des autorités sanitaires et institutions publiques, des conseils pour ralentir la propagation du coronavirus et des ressources pour vous et vos proches dans le Centre d’information sur le coronavirus (COVID-19)" ("X (user's name), act now to slow down the spread of the Coronavirus (COVID-19). Find the health authorities and public institutions' news, advices to slow down the spread of the Coronavirus for you and your entourage in the Information Center about Coronavirus (COVID-19) »).

This corresponds to the more general declaration done the same day by Kang-Xing Jin, director of Health at Facebook, who declares : "In response to the coronavirus outbreak, Facebook is supporting the global public health community’s work to keep people safe and informed. Since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a public health emergency in January, we’ve taken steps to make sure everyone has access to accurate information, stop misinformation and harmful content, and support global health experts, local governments, businesses and communities.".

Thanks, Facebook to indicate how to do ; by the way, thanks to having invited me to do it. By the way, is it really an « invitation » ? Since the expression is « act now ». Just miss the exclamation point, and the pointed finger of Uncle Sam for « war effort »!footnote-1770.

If in Law, we can consider « invitation », it would be not to the "invitation" that in the past Bank of France did to shareholders banks to refinance a bank which risks to be soon into difficulties that we could consider, invitation from which the invited cannot really escape. No, obviously no, it is just the same message that you and me can write on our Facebook pages to tell similar things about the same purpose ! But, Facebook would be, like you and me, editor of contents ?

Questions and difficulties which encourage to proceed to the legal analysis to know under which title Facebook posted such a message.

The first hypothesis is that this firm has acted spontaneously, following its « Corporate Social Responsibility » (I) If it is the right qualification, with regards to the content of the message, legal consequences are important because this firm, without generalizing to others, by the expression of its care of common good, shows, by transitivity, that it is an editor.

The second hypothesis starts from the observation that Facebook is a « crucial digital operator ». In this perspective, the firm is constraint to Compliance Law (II). It is the reason why, it is constraint by specific obligations, that excludes the spontaneous message emission qualification. If it is the right qualification, with regards to the content of the message, legal consequences are also important and of a totally different nature. Indeed, the qualification leads to develop the relation between the obligation to fight against fake news and malicious websites towards those of redirecting towards public websites, benefiting for the operator of a reliability presumption.

Read the developments below.

This working paper is the basis for an article in the French Law Journal Le Clunet.

When we compare the terms "Compliance" and "Extraterritoriality", it is often with dissatisfaction, even anger and indignation. On the momentum, after having expressed a principle of disapproval of such a merger, attention is focused on how we can fight against it, to break the link between Compliance and Extraterritoriality. But do we have to go so fast? Is this negative initial assessment correct?

Indeed, thus gone, it is frequently explained that the binding mechanisms of Compliance are suffered, that they come from abroad!footnote-1750, that they apply with efficiency but in an illegitimate way, without agreement of the one who must submit to it, whose resistance is therefore certainly ineffective but nevertheless justified. In the same spirit, when we start to shell the cases, like so many scars, sort of rosary, even crown of thorns, BNPP case!footnote-1718, Astom case!footnote-1717, etc., the wounds not yet closed turn into reproaches made against the rules, public authorities, even reproaches made against named people.

We are leaving this kind of complaint against X, which targets what would be this appalling "Compliance", this Law which would be both hostile and mechanical which would not have been able to stay within the limits of borders, Compliance being thus placed in contrast to sovereignty and protection, which presuppose staying within its limits!footnote-1716 and being able to protect companies from abroad. More concretely, this presentation targets more directly the United States, which uses "the legal weapon", slipped under what is then designated as "the artifice of the Law" with extraterritorial scope. But this effect would in reality be the very object of the whole: their hegemonic will to better organize at least a global racket, notably through the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and at best a world government through notably the embargoes.Those who believed otherwise would be naive or foolish. This silences the opponents because who likes this costume? So the world would be put in a ruled cut; what the mafia could not have done, Compliance Law would have obtained, offering the whole world to the United States thanks to the extraterritoriality of its national Law.

Compliance Law would thus become the very negation of Law, since it has the effect, even the purpose (barely concealed by strategic, powerful and shameless States), of counting borders for nothing, whereas Public International Law, in that it is built between the sovereign subjects of law that are the States presupposes the primary respect for borders to better exceed them while Private International Law takes the same postulate to better welcome foreign Law in situations presenting a foreign element!footnote-1726. Jurists believed in the force of Law; by Compliance, we would return to the sad reality that only the powerful, here the United States, dominate and - ironically - it is under the pretext of Law that they do it. It would be necessary to be well duped, or accomplice, to see there still legal where there is only the balance of powers. When one is more intelligent or skilful than that, one understands that the "small" can only be "subject" to the Compliance Law, one would have to be powerful to be the normative source and its enforcement agent. It is then towards this mis-named Department of Justice (DoJ) that the fearful, hateful and resigned glances turn. 

If you see it that way, what should you do then? The answer is obvious: react!

It is necessary to save the sovereignty, France, companies, the Law itself. If that is how the question is posed, how can we disagree? It is therefore necessary to destroy the Compliance Law and the extra-territoriality of American Law which had found this "Trojan horse", an expression so frequently used. This is the basis for the administrative reports available, for example the Berger-Lellouche!footnote-1719 parliamentary reports and the Gauvainfootnote-1720 report. Both of them broadly develop the two preceding claims, namely that the extra-priority of compliance mechanisms is illegitimate and harmful, since it is a mechanism invented by the Americans and harming the Europeans, or even invented by the Americans to harm Europeans, the description being made in much more violent terms than those used here. The description seems acquired, the reflections therefore relate to the remedies. The reaction is most often to "block" the Compliance Law in its extraterritorial effect.

But without discussing the effectiveness of the remedies proposed downstream, it is necessary to return to this description so widely shared made upstream. Because many elements on the contrary lead to affirm that ComplianceLaw first of all and by nature can only be extraterritorial and that it must be. Whether or not the State in which it was created has malicious intentions. The description which is made to us most often describes particular cases from which we draw generalities, but we cannot reduce Compliance Law to the already cooled cases, as BNPP case, or to the always hot case of the American embargo on Iran. Furthermore, one cannot take the issue of embargoes and draw conclusions, legitimate for it, but which would apply to the whole of Compliance Law. The fact that theCompliance Law is a branch of Law at the stage still of emergence can lead to this confusion which consists in taking the part for the whole, but it is very regrettable because what is justified for the embargoes does not is in no way relevant for all Compliance Law, of which precisely the Law of embargoes is only a small part, even an abusive use. This overlapping is not often perceived, because the definition of Compliance Law and its criterion are not clearly enough defined, namely the existence of a "monumental goal"!footnote-1725, which does not exist in an embargo decided unilaterally by an order decreed by the President of the United States, but which exists in all other cases and fully justifies extraterritoriality, extraterritoriality which is even consubstantial with Compliance Law (I).

Once we have distinguished the embargoes, as an atypical, sometimes even illegitimate part, of Compliance Law, we should continue this work of distinction by emphasizing that the United States has certainly invented Compliance Law!footnote-1721 but only developed a mechanical concept for the prevention and management of systemic risks. Europe has taken up this systemic conception of the protection of systems, for example financial or banking, but superimposed another conception, drawing on its deep humanist tradition!footnote-1722, whose protection of personal data is only an example and whose monumental goal is the protection of the human being. This primary concern then justifies the European use of Compliance mechanisms to interfere with global objects regardless of their location, especially the environment, and to block the entry onto the ground of objects that enter, which is contrary to Competition Law but builds a legitimate barrier under this Compliance Law, in the indifference of an extraterritorial origin (II).

Indeed, this branch of the new Law which is Compliance Law is not reducible to Competition Law!footnote-1723, any more than it is not reducible to a method. It is a substantial, extraterritorial Law because the "monumental goals" which give it substantial unity are extraterritorial. This can directly contribute to the future of a Europe which on the one hand will be able to pursue, in an extraterritorial manner, monumental humanist goals, in the field of the environment or the protection of personal information or access to the Law (in particular by the technique of compliance programs) and which, on the other hand, by the techniques of traceability of products!footnote-1724, will have the means not to bring in products manufactured in an indecent manner, except in countries which do not grant value than in Competition Law to enter the WTO.

Read the developments below.

Référence générale : Frison-Roche, M.-A., L'avocat, porteur de conviction dans le nouveau système de Compliance, Dalloz Avocat, mars 2020.

This editorial opens a thematic collective publication about Compliance.

A synthetic article on all the contributions, published in May 2020, mirrors it: "Attorney and Compliance - The future of the character and his tool: Law, Humanism and Defense"

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English Summary of the article (written in French) : 

If we perceive Compliance Law as an aggression of the private company and a binding set of mechanisms that have no meaning and added value for it, then the attorney has a utility: to defend the business. It can do so not only during the sanctions phase, but also to prevent it.

But this function is not central.

He and she becomes so if we understand Compliance Law as being a body of substantial rules, pursuing a "monumental goal": the protection of the person, goal injected by political bodies and taken up by the operator. From this, the company must convince everyone to take it back, inside the company and outside. In a general and contradictory debate, the attorney carries this conviction, because he and shed is always convincing those who in the end judge (market, public opinion, etc.) that is their raison d'être.

Read the article

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Read the Working Paper underlying this article, with the technical references and all the articles serving as the basis for all the assertions in this article

Joachim du Bellay offre ce poème, qui est demeuré célèbre en ce qu'il exprime dans le style de la plainte l'expression de l'amour nostalgique d'un pays perdu. 

Mais si l'on s'attachait ici à la mention dans son premier vers, qui fait son titre : "France, mère ... des lois"  ?

L'on s'aperçoit alors que la mention en est faite en frontispice du poème pour ne plus jamais apparaître.

Qu'en est-ce de cet sorte d'hommage implicite, effanescent ?

I. LE POEME OFFERT A LA FRANCE, MERE DES LOIS

France, mère des arts, des armes et des lois

France, mère des arts, des armes et des lois,
Tu m'as nourri longtemps du lait de ta mamelle :
Ores, comme un agneau qui sa nourrice appelle,
Je remplis de ton nom les antres et les bois.

Référence : Frison-Roche, M.-A., La mesure de l'effectivité et de l'efficacité des outils de la compliance (conception, présentation et modération des débats), in Les outils de la Compliance, Journal of Regulation & Compliance.

Voir les autres thèmes, autres dates et autres manifestations particulières du cycle dans son ensemble. 

Cette conférence sert d'appui à la réalisation d'un ouvrage plus global portant d'une façon générale sur Les outils de la Compliance.

 L'ouvrage Compliance Tools sera publié en même temps. 

Présentation de la Conférence : Après avoir examiné différents outils spécifiques, comme La cartographie des risques ou Les incitations, et avant d'en aborder d'autres comme ceux relevant de la a Compliance by Design, celle-ci méritant  aussi d'être examinée avec quelque distance dans sa prétention à être la solution à tout enjeu de compliance, il convient de regarder comment l'on mesure l'efficacité de tous ces outils de Compliance. En effet, puisque toutes les techniques sont des "outils", ils ne prennent sens qu'au regard d'une finalité qu'ils doivent atteindre effectivement. Cette effectivité doit être mesurée, et cela dès l'Ex Ante, l'entreprise devant en permanence donner à voir l'effectivité de la performance des outils de la Compliance.

Mais autant les normes prolifèrent, les discours se multiplient, les engagements sont pris, autant les techniques de mesure de l'effectivité de l'ensemble semblent assez faibles. Non pas que les sujets de droit astreints aux obligations de Compliance ou désireux de réaliser les buts systémiques ou de bien commun visés par la Compliance ne désirent pas en avoir, mais ces instruments de mesure semblent encore les moins construits, souvent déclaratifs ou de type discursifs, ou trop mécaniques. Dès lors, est-ce en partant du but que l'on cherche à atteindre que l'on doit mesurer l'efficacité des outils de Compliance, sans que cela transforme les tâches qui pèsent de grè ou de force sur les opérateurs en obligation de résultat ? Ou est-ce en demeurant en amont, par une seule "conformité" à ce qui leur est demandé, comme comportement et comme organisation structurelle, que les entreprises donnent à voir qu'elles ont effectivement rempli leur tâche, sans plus se soucier des effets produits sur la réalité des choses, cette réalité que ceux qui ont conçu la norme avaient en tête ?

Cette question a des implications majeure en terme de charge de preuve et de responsabilité, impliquant des organisations plaçant la confiance, coeur de la Compliance, plutôt dans des instruments technologiques connectant des data ou plutôt dans des personnes ayant le sens du bien commun. Cette question est aujourd'hui ouverte.

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