A group of NGOs are threatening to take France to court over "discriminatory" ID checks based on colour and ethnic backgroung
Credit: JEAN-PAUL PELISSIER/Reuters
France on Wednesday was told to end “discriminatory identity checks” based on racial profiling as it faced the country’s first-ever class-action lawsuit based on colour or supposed ethnic origins.
A group of NGOs, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, served the French government formal legal notice to enact deep policing reforms to stamp out ID checks based on a person’s colour within four months or face a landmark court case.
The NGOs are employing a little-used 2016 French law that allows associations to take such a legal move.
Slim Ben Achour, a lawyer for one of the NGOs, said they were pursuing the class-action on behalf of racial minorities who are mostly second or third-generation French citizens. "It’s revolutionary because we’re going to speak for hundreds of thousands, even a million people,” he said.
The legal action comes as the French force is reeling from allegations that it is institutionally racist.
In November, Sébastien Roché, one of France’s leading law enforcement experts, warned that its police was going through the “worst moral crisis in modern history” after a string of violent incidents in which officers were accused of misconduct, brutality and racism.
He was speaking after a video showing white officers beating up an unarmed black music producer in his Paris studio went viral.
CCTV camera footage, widely distributed on social networks, shows producer Michel Zecler being beaten up by police officers
Credit: AFP
Decades of refusal by successive French governments to introduce UK-style independent oversight and systemic reform had brought its police to a perilous breaking point with much of the population, he warned.
In December, President Emmanuel Macron admitted to a problem of discrimination against people of African or Arab descent.
"When you have a skin colour that is not white, you are stopped much more (by police). You are identified as a problem factor. And that cannot be justified," he told Brut.
He announced plans to set up a website where people could file complaints of discrimination.
His remarks caused anger among police unions, which deny any problem of institutional racism and say they are bearing the brunt of an increasingly violent public.
Alternative Police union dismissed the action on Wednesday as a “political and dogmatic manoeuvre by these organisations who are well known for their anti-cop stance.”
A group of NGOs has initiated a class-action lawsuit — the first in France — against the state for 'discriminatory' racial profiling when conducting ID checks
Credit: SAMEER AL-DOUMY/AFP
The 350-page warning letter sent on Wednesday to the government includes testimony from dozens of alleged victims of racial profiling in nine French cities.
The groups demanded a change in the criminal code to "explicitly ban discrimination during identity checks”. They also want an independent mechanism for hearing allegations of racial profiling and giving people subjected to an ID check a written record of the operation.
"It’s not about accusing the police of being racist but about a system that itself generates discriminatory practices," said lawyer Antoine Lyon-Caen.
The lawsuit came days before of a government summit on how to improve relations between the police and communities.
Interior minister Gérald Darmanin this week mooted the idea of creating 10,000 police internships for youths from deprived areas.
A study carried out in 2009 by NGO Open Society Justice Initiative and French state research body CNRS showed that black people in Paris were six times more likely to be stopped for their ID than whites.
People with features seen as "Arab" were eight times more likely to be asked to show their papers.
In 2017, a report by France’s right’s ombudsman concluded that "a young man perceived as black or Arab… has a probability 20 times higher" of having his ID checked than the rest of the population.
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