Police violence: left-wing organizations denounce a ban on marching in Paris

About fifty associations, unions and left-wing parties, including the LFI, EELV and the CGT, denounced a new ban on demonstrations against police violence in Paris on Saturday afternoon.

• Also read: 2,000 demonstrators against police violence in Paris despite the ban

• Also read: Marches in France against police violence: rally for Adama Traoré in Paris banned

The ban order, issued by Police Prefect Laurent Nuñez, was the subject of an urgent appeal being examined by the Paris Administrative Court on Saturday morning.

The summary proceedings judge was due to make his decision at noon, while the “national coordination against police violence” rally is scheduled to take place in the Place de la République from 3 p.m.

The associations, unions, collectives and political parties who co-signed a press release published on Saturday morning consider this new ban on demonstrations “an obvious sign of authoritarianism”.

“We condemn in the strongest terms this attempt to silence political expression in working-class neighborhoods and the repression of social and environmental movements. The organizations are demanding that this march take place,” they said.

Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin announced on Wednesday the ban on this gathering and all other “demonstrations directly related to the unrest” until July 15 inclusive.

At the hearing before the administrative court on Saturday, Me Lucie Simon denounced “a general and therefore illegal order” for the ban on demonstrations. “If we want to contain the anger, we have to channel its democratic expression,” she said on behalf of the organizers.

For the representative of the police headquarters at the hearing, the problem “is not the object of the demonstration, but the possibility that violent people are there”. And this against the background of the “low availability of the police” after the riots and the mobilization of an important security facility on Thursday and Friday evening for July 14th.

Police headquarters last week banned an earlier demonstration in Paris to commemorate Adama Traoré, who died shortly after being arrested by gendarmes in July 2016. Despite this prefectural measure, around 2,000 people had gathered by July 8.