Since Thursday, more than 500 arrests have taken place in Paris following spontaneous mobilizations against the pension reform. Magistrates, lawyers and elected officials are concerned about a tightening in the management of the maintenance of order.
He came out Sunday evening from the police station of 1is arrondissement of Paris after having spent nearly 55 hours there. “I was in a cell full to bursting with demonstrators. There were students, RATP employees, a retiree. Next door, in another cell, there were high school students. It was the gathering of France which is demonstrating.”
Léo R., a student at Paris 8, was taken into police custody on Friday after being arrested during an undeclared student demonstration against the pension reform. The procession had just left the University of Tolbiac to join the waste treatment center of Ivry-sur-Seine when the police intervened. “The police wanted to prevent us from joining the garbage collectors’ picket. They blocked our way, so we decided to make a chain. They then started gassing us and hitting us, but we held on,” says the student. After being nasse, Leo is finally boarded with four other demonstrators. He is accused of having participated in an illegal assembly and of having committed violence against a person holding public authority, which is “absolutely false” according to him.
Placed under judicial supervision, Léo R. will be tried in court in September, unlike his comrades released free. Among them, Léo BC, 20 years old. The history student at Tolbiac remained for 22 hours in police custody without any charges being ultimately brought against him. “I was also accused of violence against a person holding public authority because I supposedly hit a policeman. Fortunately, the scene was filmed. On the contrary, you can see that I am being strangled twice very violently by a policeman. I am now considering filing a complaint.”
Since the use of 49.3 by the government to pass its pension reform, spontaneous gatherings have multiplied in Paris. And the repression would have gone up a notch according to demonstrators who, with supporting videos, denounce the brutality of the police.
Facts noted by journalists present during the demonstrations. The newspaper Le Monde thus reports the case of a demonstrator thrown to the ground and molested by a police officer from the motorized violent action repression brigades (Brav M) during a charge, others bludgeoned in a hall of a building near of the Place d’Italie on March 18.
That day, the independent journalist Clément Lanot said he was hit with a truncheon. Some of his equipment was broken. “The police stations of Ile-de-France are full to bursting”, says a lawyer. In all, these rallies gave rise to 509 arrests in the capital. For Thursday evening alone, 292 people were taken into custody. But 283 came out free without any charge being brought against them, the offenses being insufficiently characterized. “This shows that there is an abusive use of police custody, notes Nelly Bertrand, general secretary of the Syndicat de la Magistrature. Custody is currently used to prevent gatherings and scare demonstrators. However, justice is not intended to be instrumentalized in this way for the maintenance of order.
The Syndicate of Lawyers of France (SAF) for its part published a press release on Monday in which it points “the unacceptable excesses worthy of an authoritarian country”.
“The reaction of the security forces was once again disproportionate and particularly violent. The demonstrators were trapped, loaded and gassed in several cities, while the technique of the trap was deemed illegal by the Council of State ,” writes the union that castigates the policing doctrine “which seems to have as its objective the intimidation of demonstrators and the cessation of the social movement, undermining the freedom to come and go, the freedom of expression and communication and the right to collective expression of ideas and opinions”.
In the texts, the fact of participating in an undeclared demonstration does not constitute an offence. It becomes so if after two warnings, the demonstrators remain on the spot. This is called the crowdan offense punishable by one year’s imprisonment and a fine of €15,000. “Everything is therefore played on the context of the arrest and the minutes must be very detailed to justify the placement in police custody”, explains Nelly Bertrand of the Syndicat de la Magistrature. However, many demonstrators claim to have been charged and arrested without prior warning. Others say they were dumped, without the possibility of leaving.
Facts testified by David Belliard, EELV deputy to the mayor of Paris, in charge of the transformation of public space and mobility. “I thought that this disastrous management of the maintenance of order was over. The prefect of Paris Nuñez had undertaken not to use the same techniques as his predecessor. But we find the same faults. We are still not going to put in custody all the people who demonstrate! Today, there is anger, it must be expressed because it is legitimate. This new tactic of the police headquarters looks like a deliberate tension to discredit protesters. That would be a major mistake.”
Other elected Parisians like the councilor of Paris EELV Raphaëlle Rémy-Leleu are worried about a possible escalation. “The rise in tension serves a political purpose. As for repression, it has several harmful effects, with direct victims of violence, an increase in damage, and also, very logically, the deterioration of the police-population link.”
Not enough to discourage the demonstrators, who despite the adoption of the pension reform, are again in the street this Monday evening. For Léo R., the student released this Sunday and who is now banned from demonstrating in Paris: “by placing us in police custody, they wanted to demoralize us but in talking with others, I saw that it had only strengthened the determination to fight against this government which does not hesitate to go through in force and who is ready to put hundreds of people in cells.”