Nigel Paul Farage is an English politician, and United Kingdom Independence Party member of the European Parliament for South East England. He is a founder member of the party, and has contested UK Parliamentary elections twice, retaining his deposit both times. He was elected to the European Parliament in 1999 and re-elected in 2004. He is currently leader of the eleven-strong UKIP contingent in the European Parliament, and co-leader of the multinational eurosceptic group, Independence and Democracy.

On 18 November 2004 he announced in the European Parliament that Jacques Barrot, the French Commissioner designate, had been barred from elected office in France for 2 years, after being convicted in 2000 of embezzling £2 million from government funds and diverting it into the coffers of his party. He claimed that French President Jacques Chirac had granted Barrot amnesty⁽¹⁾. BBC reports claimed that under French law this made it illegal to even mention the conviction [1]; French law, however, does not have any such prohibition⁽²⁾. Farage was attacked for his comments; he even claimed he have been threatened with arrest [2]. Certainly the Parliament's President, Josep Borrell, ordered him to retract his comments under threat of "legal consequences" [3]. However, the following day it was confirmed that Barrot had received an 8 month suspended jail sentence in the case, and that this had been immediately expunged by the amnesty decided by Chirac and his parliamentary majority. The Commission's president, Jose Manuel Barroso admitted that he had not known of Barrot's criminal record when appointing him as a Commission vice-president.[4] The Socialist and Liberal groups in the European Parliament then joined UKIP in demanding the sacking of Barrot for failing to disclose the conviction during his confirmation hearings.[5]

(1) The President of France does not grant amnesty. The Parliament of France occasionally votes amnesty laws covering minor crimes, especially at the beginning of a new presidential and parliamentarian term. These laws, including the 2002 law, may have a clause allowing the president to extend the benefit of this law to specific persons at his discretion, within certain categories of minor crimes and given certain other circumstances.

(2) The prohibition of the French penal code against mentioning crimes covered by an amnesty concerns judges, prosecutors etc. in the course of their duties (CP L133-11). Amnesty measures do not harm third parties (L133-10).

External links

• Official website

References

• 2002 amnesty law
• Penal Code, articles L133-9, L133-10, L133-11