The Council of Europe has faulted France’s laws on corporal punishment for children, rapping Paris for not fully prohibiting smacking.

On Wednesday, the European Union’s Strasbourg-based human rights watchdog said the laws were not “sufficiently clear, binding and precise.”

France, where, according to polls, the right to smack children enjoys widespread support, bans violence against children, but does allow parents the right to discipline them.

The Council was ruling on a complaint lodged by the Britain-based child protection charity, Approach, which says French law violates part of the European Social Charter, a treaty first adopted in 1961 and revised in 1996.

Laurence Rossignol, the French minister for the family (seen below), has called for a “collective debate” about “the usefulness of corporal punishment in the education of children.”

She, however, has said this will “not be enshrined in the law.”

“For abusive parents, we have a penal code. For those that occasionally resort to corporal punishment, we need to help them do things differently and not discredit them by saying ‘the judge is coming to deal with that.’”

Also on Wednesday, the watchdog warned that torture at the hands of European police and prison officers is feeding the threat of terrorism across the continent, demanding an end to such ill-treatment.

HN/HSN/SS