outline for the future status of New Caledonia by JJ Urvoas

Hello everyone,

The association is returning to you to send you a report produced by the former Minister of Justice, JJ Urvoas, which in 2021 proposed an  outline for the future status of New Caledonia.

In this report, we can read that JJ Urvoas already sensed, 3 years before the events of 2024, that  if the “no” to independence won, it is plausible that a significant part of the loyalist electorate would seek, in the run-up to the legislative elections, to definitively settle the concessions made to the Kanaks over the past thirty years .  Similarly, the bitterness of defeat could push fragments of Melanesian youth  […]  to challenge the institutional game in favor of an affirmation of their political demands by force.

It is  unfortunate that in Paris, no one heard or took these words into account.

He recalls his conviction that  non-independence is expressed in a federation  because  New Caledonia is not quite France ¹ .

He returns to  the proposals made by Pierre Frogier in the Senate  , which ,  according to him,  mark  a worrying retreat.  As a reminder, these proposals are currently those of the Loyalists. The former Minister of Justice compares them to a  “Pons 3 status”  and carries  the seeds  […]  of the Balkanization of the territory.  In politics, the term Balkanization  constitutes the breakup of a country ; its  dislocation into small independent states . It was notably used following the breakup of Yugoslavia into several separate states.

He recalls that only the Calédonie Ensemble party published a brochure during the 2nd ^referendum  entitled “let’s build a consensus on a shared future for our country” that its leader, MP  Philippe Gomès, on the contrary wanted to  extend the autonomy currently recognized in New Caledonia to the confines of sovereignty in a form of external federalism.  The latter even indicated that it was desirable to  combine the sovereignty of the country and that of France,  as indicated recently by the presidents of the Senate and the National Assembly  visiting New Caledonia. However, it is unfortunate for the association that his party, for legal reasons ² , supported the idea of ​​thawing the electoral body at the source of the insurrection of May 2024, following the extremists at the base of this proposal. It is equally regrettable that, during the last legislative elections, the latter did not join forces with the Oceanian Awakening Party, which also advocated a third way.

In this regard, he does not forget to recall in this report that during the 2017 presidential election, the vote for the extreme right was  in the majority in the city of Noumea (50.90%), in greater Noumea, as in the majority of municipalities on the West Coast, all with non-independence tendencies, where the European population dominates.  Unfortunately, we can only note with dismay the outcome implied by the choice of extremes, namely chaos.

To conclude, JJ Urvoas,  takes up the notion of the late Professor Guy Agniel, of “associated country”, although thinking of federation, thus denoting that the words matter little, only the content is important  and that if for diplomatic reasons and consensus, it is appropriate not to qualify a thing by such or such word, the idea, the meaning and the direction in which one wishes to go is, for its part, primordial. In other words, if the path is certainly important, the destination is even more so.

The former Minister of Justice reminds us that it would be interesting to  reread the debates that accompanied the development of the “French Union” between the mid-1940s and the end of the 1950s, imagining different forms of interlocking sovereignty between the former colonies and the metropolis.

You can find the entire report at the following link:

: LECLUB_pays_associe_DEF2_WEB.pdf

1 [INTERVIEW] For former Minister of Justice Jean-Jacques Urvoas, in New Caledonia, “the future is being prepared now”

2  Philippe Dunoyer: “We are in favor of opening the electoral body to all adopted Caledonians”