Thousands of people were sentenced under two French laws in force between 1942 and 1982, one determining the age of consent for same-sex relations and the other defining such relations as an aggravating factor in acts of “public outrage”. The sponsor of the bill to be debated on Wednesday, Senator Hussein Bourgi of the Socialist party, said he wanted the French government to recognise the state’s role in discriminating against people engaging in same-sex relations. “This draft law has symbolic value,” he told AFP. “It aims to rectify an error that society committed at the time.”