Communication de l’UFA à la FESAC

We have been living for years under the yoke of severe regulations which have, twice already, forced owners to relinquish the firearms they had legally in their possession.
The world of legally owned firearms has not yet coped with having had to give up its category A1-11° firearms [1]. All this because the Minister of the Interior has decided to sacrifice them on the altar of well-meaning.
It was necessary to react to these iniquitous attacks which target sports shooters and legal firearms owners, as a whole. Hence our appeal to the French Council of State. It must be said that we knew in advance that this upper administrative court sometimes makes decisions that seem biased. It had already ruled on the absence of any property rights for firearms subject to state authorization. The three requests presented [2] were joined and rejected on the grounds that the right of ownership does not exist in matters of firearms.

Initially, our hope rested on the material inaccuracy of the arguments put forward by the Ministry of the Interior, and on the weakness of the motivation, essentially media, of the decree. During the procedure our hope was reinforced by noting that the ministry did not produce any statistical data in support of its assertions, and that it persisted in invoking a single news item, the so-called "Gendarmes case of Ambert", which we knew was unrelated to transformed firearms [3].
This is why we were very disappointed to see that the Council of State, whose decision was final (no appeal or cassation), rejected our appeal without responding to the arguments developed over several pages by the various applicants. Just an affirmation which will repeat almost word for word that of the ministry : « ...it appears from the documents in the file that the firearms in question, which have been classified in category A1 because of their dangerousness, are automatically reloaded after each shot fired and, resulting of a transformation undergone by automatic firearms to deprive them of their ability to fire in bursts, are not likely, contrary to what is maintained, to be the subject of a transformation in the opposite direction. »

All judges must give reasons for their decisions. For this they must examine the arguments submitted to them and respond to them by something other than simply repeating the administration’s assertions.

The Clay Pot rebels

As France did not want to hear the claims of sport shooters, the UFA decided to appeal to European authorities : the Commission of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights. It is a question of avoiding the about-faces which recurrently impact the freedoms of legal firearms holders ; they need legal stability. And, we want a fair civil trial, which we missed with the judgment of the Council of State.

To undertake this process, our association has fully measured the risks of negative case law with our team of three lawyers, it has built a new strategy.
Every fight has a price, this one more than any other since we had to commission a lawyer who is an expert in this type of litigation. The case will be hot and will cost a significant sum that the UFA cannot afford alone.
For a long time, the world of recreational firearms users has been asking us to unite all people of goodwill, whether associations or individuals. We have heard their demands.

En 2016, c’est l’UFA qui a organisé le congrès à Aix en Provence.

The appeal

The UFA has called on everyone : associations for the defense of firearms enthusiasts, legal persons in the world of arms or simple individuals, shooters, hunters, collectors and shooting clubs to support this unprecedented action which concerns all owners of recreational firearms.
To finance this exceptional operation, a crowdfunding campaign has been initiated. If firearms enthusiasts win, backers will be proud to say they were in this fight. If they were to lose, each of them will be able to hold their heads high and say to themselves with pride that legally we defended our freedoms until the end.

crowdfunding campaign