[ad_1]
Demonstration against police violence and bill in Paris
© AFP
More than one hundred thousand people participated in national demonstrations against police violence and for press freedom in France. According to the French Interior Ministry, 133,000 people took to the streets in around a hundred cities on Saturday. However, according to organizers, 200,000 people participated in the protests in Paris alone. The demonstrations were overshadowed by riots and arrests, and dozens of people were injured.
After an initially peaceful phase, riots broke out on the sidelines of the protests in Paris, journalists from the AFP news agency reported. The police used tear gas against the protesters who set up barricades and threw stones at the security forces. In Place de la Bastille, protesters set fire to a newsstand, the entrance to a building belonging to the French Central Bank and a neighboring brasserie. Several cars also burned in the area.
A photographer was injured during a police raid in Paris along with several protesters, an AFP journalist reported. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) criticized the police for the “unacceptable” violence. The photographer was hit in the face with a truncheon, RSF Secretary General Christophe Deloire said on Twitter. There were also riots in the city of Rennes, in northwestern France.
The Interior Ministry announced that 37 officials were injured in protests across the country, 23 of them in the capital. Police arrested 46 protesters in Paris and the region. French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin condemned the attacks on police officers at rallies. These are “unacceptable,” he wrote on Twitter.
Thousands of people took to the streets in cities like Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille, Lille, Nantes and Montpellier. They protested against a planned law by which the French government wants to criminalize certain photos or films of police officers, which could lead to criticism of individual police officers. Journalists’ associations fear massive restrictions on press freedom.
The protests were fueled by two new cases of police violence that were recorded earlier this week and caused horror across the country. President Emmanuel Macron was “shocked” on Friday by recordings of police officers beating and racially insulting a black music producer in his Paris studio. He spoke of “unacceptable aggression” and called the images “shameful”. Previously, there had already been massive criticism of the police for the forced evacuation of a refugee camp in Paris.
An alliance of journalists’ unions and human rights organizations called for the “March of freedoms”. According to the organizers, a total of 500,000 people participated in the demonstrations nationwide, in Paris there were 200,000. The Interior Ministry, however, spoke of a total of 133,000 protesters and 46,000 participants in Paris.
[ad_2]
