Parliamentary Commission on Cults in France
Open-knowledge reference entry
The French National Assembly, the lower house of the Parliament of France, set up a Parliamentary Commission on Cults in France (French: Commission parlementaire sur les sectes en France), also known as the Guyard Commission, on 11 July 1995 following the events involving the members of the Order of the Solar Temple in late 1994 and in 1995 in the Vercors, Switzerland and in Canada. Chaired by deputy Alain Gest, a member of the Union for French Democracy conservative party, the commission had to determine what should constitute a cult. It came to categorize various groups according to their supposed threat or innocuity (towards members of the groups themselves or towards society and the state). The Commission reported back in December 1995.
The Commission held various hearings with persons involved in new religious movement (NRM) activities or involved in anti-cult movements. Some organizations, including the Church of Scientology and the United States Department of State, criticized its categorization-methodology.
Subsequent French Parliamentary Commissions on cults reported in 1999 and in 2006.
History
The first Parliamentary Commission on Cults in France was created in 1995, but the cults had long been watched by the Direction centrale des renseignements généraux. A report had already been done on this issue in 1983 by Alain Vivien, on a request by the prime minister.
The commission was established following a wave of mass suicides—and very likely murders—orchestrated by members of the "Order of the Solar Temple" in Canada, Switzerland, and France in 1994, as a 2023 bill reiterated.
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This entry incorporates text from “Parliamentary Commission on Cults in France” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.