Anti-Macron protesters are regularly having their fundamental rights abused by French police, one watchdog in the country has said.
Dominique Simonnot, the head of the Controller General of Places of Deprivation of Liberty — an independent state body in France — has denounced the treatment of those protesting President Emmanuel Macron at the hands of police as regularly violating their fundamental rights.
France is now regularly witnessing protests in the tens, sometimes even hundreds of thousands take place against the Macron government, which insensed much of the populace after forcing through pension reform measures without a vote in the country’s parliament.
Though many protesters remain peaceful, police in the country have regularly been forced to deal with extreme acts of violence from some activists, with one officer even being set on fire during May Day demonstrations earlier this week.
The activities of police have also come under increasing scrutiny, with Le Figaro reporting Simonnot writing to Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin last month to warn that law enforcement officials were regularly abusing the rights of protesters, with the content of the letter being publicly unveiled on Wednesday.
According to the watchdog, police in the country have been regularly engaging in so-called “preventative” arrests of people who had not done anything wrong, with some Parisian officers being ordered by higher-ups to arrest “any person being in one sector or another” of the country’s capital.
She went on to say that many of these protesters went on to be detained in material conditions that were also in breach of their rights, adding that around 80 per cent of those detained by police see their cases “closed without further action”, with many of the few people who do end up seeing a courtroom also said to walk free without conviction.
Ultimately, the watchdog concludes that all of these factors point towards an “instrumentalization of police custody measures for repressive purposes” in the country.
Simonnot’s intervention has provoked anger from the French government, with Darmanin reportedly claiming that the watchdog’s complaints exceed the competency of her role as the head of the Controller General of Places of Deprivation of Liberty.
Regardless of the veracity of this counter-claim, the former journalist’s accusations against French police have been as serious in the country, especially considering the fact that many both inside and outside the political sphere have taken to accusing certain members of French law enforcement of police brutality.
The most notable case in recent weeks involved some members of the Brigades for the Repression of Violent Action (BRAV-M) making violent threats against protesters that had already been detained.
Seemingly unaware they were being recorded, officers reportedly referred to one protester as having a “slappable” face, while one member of the force went into extreme detail about how he would have broken the legs of one demonstrator if given the chance.
In many ways though, things are not that simple in France, with police also regularly being on the receiving end of extreme violence.
In one particular incident, an officer dealing with May Day rioting was set on fire, forcing his colleagues to desperately pat him down as protesters threw objects at them. Protesters felt the brunt of the police that day too, with one losing a hand to an exploding stun-grenade.