Independent report slams indiscriminate arrests at French pension protests

Issued on: 03/05/2023 – 21:43

The damning report, which was sent to Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin last month, highlights “serious breaches of fundamental rights” and voices concern about the “trivialisation” of police custody “without legal basis”.  

It is based on investigations carried out at multiple police stations in Paris in late March, following two nights of violent clashes triggered by Macron’s decision to force his pension reform through parliament without a vote in mid-March. 

In a letter sent to Darmanin on April 17, the chief inspector of prisons, Dominique Simonnot, flagged “alarming shortcomings” in the work of officers who carried out the arrests, blaming police chiefs and public prosecutors for encouraging “preventive” – or even arbitrary – arrests. 

“Some officers,” she wrote, “had been given instructions and orders from their superiors to carry out indiscriminate arrests in given sectors of the (French) capital.”   

Simonnot, a former investigative journalist at satirical weekly newspaper “Le Canard enchaîné”, denounced a “systematic use of police detention as a method of repression”, noting that only 20% of arrests resulted in charges being brought. 

‘Completely false’ 

The widespread unrest that followed months of peaceful mass protests against pension reform has revived a longstanding debate on French policing, once again highlighting the lack of checks on law enforcement in a country where the interior minister, who is in charge of police oversight, is commonly referred to as “France’s top cop”. 

>> Read more: Use of force signals ‘crisis of authority’ as France’s pension battle turns to unrest

In a written reply to the inspector, Darmanin contested the report’s conclusions, stressing the difficulty of collecting evidence of offences during violent and chaotic clashes. 

He also accused Simonnot of exceeding her jurisdiction, arguing that her office is tasked with monitoring the “conditions” of police detentions – but not their “appropriateness”.  

Police Prefect Laurent Nunez, the French capital’s police chief, has repeatedly claimed that, “there is no such thing as preventive arrests”. On Wednesday, he said he felt “insulted” by Simonnot’s report. 

“I never pass on instructions to carry out preventive arrests,” he told French broadcaster Cnews, describing the inspector’s conclusions as “completely false”. 

French police have faced similar accusations in the past, most notably during the Yellow Vest protests that rocked Macron’s first term in office. 

Then, as now, critics – including rights campaigners, opposition lawmakers and magistrates – accused the authorities of curtailing the right to protest by abusing their powers. 

‘Hijacking the judiciary’ 

In Paris alone, several hundred people were detained during the first three days of protests triggered by Macron’s decision to bypass parliament on March 17. All but a handful were released within 48 hours without being charged.

They included “minors, homeless people and others who had just walked out of a meeting”, lawyer Coline Bouillon told reporters at the time, adding that she and other lawyers would file a complaint for “arbitrary detention”. 

“The judiciary is not at the disposal of those seeking to repress social movements,” the Syndicat de la magistrature, a union of magistrates, wrote in a press release days later, condemning “illegal police violence”, the “misuse of police custody” and attempts to “hijack the judiciary”. 

Lawmakers from the left-wing opposition have denounced a campaign aimed at intimidating protesters with threats of arrest. They notably flagged Darmanin’s wrongful claims in the media that taking part in undeclared protests constitutes “an offence”. 

The widespread arrests have also caught the eye of human rights monitors both at home and abroad, including Amnesty International, which has documented arbitrary arrests by French police in the past. 

At the height of the unrest in late March, Claire Hédon, France’s human rights ombudswoman, issued a statement warning against indiscriminate arrests and the use of “kettling” tactics, which involve surrounding demonstrators or bystanders and confining them to a very small area as a method of crowd control.

Days later, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatovic expressed her concern over the “arrest and detention in police custody of some demonstrators and persons who were in the vicinity of the demonstrations for acts that do not justify such interferences with the right to liberty and security”.