[D66] Macron prepares “global security” law banning the filming of French police

[R.O.]

    wsws.org:


    Macron prepares “global security” law banning the filming of French
    police


          Anthony Torres
          <https://www.wsws.org/en/authors/Anthony-Torres>, Alex Lantier
          <https://www.wsws.org/en/authors/Alex-Lantier>


          4 hours ago

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On Tuesday, President Emmanuel Macron’s government presented its “global 
security” bill to the National Assembly. Coming after the announcement 
of plans for a law against “separatism” ostensibly targeting Islamist 
groups, this bill is part of a campaign to establish a permanent state 
of emergency, handing draconian powers to the police.

Its provisions are unprecedented. Anyone publishing of images of a 
public event including police agents in a way that could “harm the 
agent’s physical or psychological well-being” faces one year in jail and 
a €45,000 fine. This purely subjective criterion, which allows police to 
arrest anyone filming them simply by stating that they feel 
uncomfortable being filmed, undermines freedom of the press and any 
attempt to hold security forces accountable for police brutality.

Emmanuel Macron (en.kremlin.ru)

The law also grants police vast new powers to carry out 
video-surveillance of the population. Access to security cameras in 
stores or public institutions as well as apartment complexes will be 
granted not only to national but also municipal police. Moreover, the 
bill authorises police to deploy drones with facial recognition 
technology to overfly and monitor public protest marches.

It comes, moreover, after it emerged that the government quietly slipped 
a provision into its law authorising university research funding to 
effectively ban protests in universities. It reads: “Penetrating or 
remaining in an institution of higher education without authorisation by 
legislative or regulatory acts or by the appropriate authorities, in 
order to disturb the tranquility or good order of the establishment, can 
face penalties.” These include three years in prison and a €45,000 fine.

It is evident that, after years of mounting social protests in France 
and internationally, a turning point has been reached. After bloody 
repression of strikes and “yellow vest” protests, the Macron government 
was terrified by international mass protests that erupted, including in 
France, after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis this 
spring. Facing mounting public anger at the massive death toll from 
COVID-19, the ruling elite is trying to establish a police dictatorship.

Unsustainable levels of social inequality and the state criminality like 
that revealed by the pandemic are everywhere undermining whatever 
remains of democratic forms of rule. In America, Trump is refusing to 
admit defeat in the presidential elections and launching a coup, 
appealing to far-right militias to try to keep him in office. In France, 
the government is trampling upon constitutionally protected rights, such 
as press freedom and the right to protest, ramming through an 
illegitimate law in a desperate attempt to silence opposition by 
creating a climate of police terror.

There is no question that this law is illegitimate and incompatible with 
a democratic form of government. The United Nations Human Rights Council 
and the French government’s own human rights ombudsman have both 
denounced the law as violating fundamental democratic principles.

The UN noted that publishing images of police is “not only essential to 
respect the right to free information, but also legitimate in order to 
exercise democratic control of public institutions. Their absence could 
in particular prevent the documentation of potential abuses and 
excessive use of force by security forces during demonstrations.” The UN 
warned that by enacting the law, France would violate the Universal 
Declaration of Human Rights as well as the European Convention of Human 
Rights.

Claire Héron, France’s human rights ombudsman, warned that the law is 
“not necessary to protect police and paramilitary police, unduly 
threatens freedom of expression, and creates obstacles to control their 
action.” She also found that filming demonstrators as under the terms of 
the law could “directly threaten the privacy” of demonstrators and 
“potentially threaten the freedom to demonstration, which the state is 
tasked with protecting.”

While the bill was being presented to the National Assembly, 
journalists’ unions and human rights groups held protests against this 
antidemocratic law. In Toulouse, around 1,300 people, including “yellow 
vest” protesters marking the two-year anniversary of their protests, met 
in the city centre and were dispersed by riot police firing tear gas an 
hour later. Around 700 attended in Bordeaux and Lyon, where protests 
took place before the police prefecture, as well as several hundred in 
Marseille and Rennes, on Republic Square.

In Paris, several hundred protesters gathered in front of the National 
Assembly on Tuesday, while deputies inside began debating the bill. Riot 
police surrounded them, firing volleys of tear gas and arresting 33 people.

A journalist at the France3 public television station filming the 
demonstration on assignment with a cell phone was arrested and detained. 
“Identified by his press card, he was nonetheless arrested and freed 
today in the early afternoon. No reason for the detention was given and 
no charges were filed,” France3-Paris stated, adding that it “condemns 
with the greatest firmness this abusive and arbitrary arrest of a 
journalist while at work.”

France’s public television authority issued a statement, declaring: 
“Management of France-Télévisions condemns this restriction on press 
freedom and the exercise of the right to inform” and “reserves the right 
to undertake necessary legal action.”

Nonetheless, members of Macron’s Republic on the March (LREM) party 
insisted they would ram the law through at all costs. Interior Minister 
Gérald Darmanin, who while presenting his “anti-separatism” law has 
appealed to anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim sentiment by denouncing kosher 
and halal food aisles in supermarkets, made clear that this law is 
intended to muzzle the press.

Darmanin defended the arrest of French state television personnel, 
saying that if they want to cover demonstrations, journalists “must be 
closer to the authorities” and “furnish them with reports.”

A fascist stench is rising from the Macron administration. Jean-Michel 
Fauvergue, a co-sponsor of the “global security” bill and the former 
leader of the French national police’s RAID assault squad, indicated 
that he felt censorship is necessary to stem rising public outrage at 
the state and the security forces. He said that the law would “win back 
terrain” lost in the “war of images” that “authority, the state in 
particular, is currently losing.”

Fauvergue did not say it, but the target of the war waged by the state 
is the people, and above all the working class.

In the last five years, countless videos on social media have exposed 
acts of savage police brutality against “yellow vest” protesters, 
striking transport workers, and student protesters. During the “yellow 
vest” protests alone, more than 11,000 people were arrested and 
detained, over 4,400 wounded by police, two-dozen people lost eyes and 
five lost hands, while one onlooker, Zineb Redouane, aged 80, was shot 
and killed with a police tear gas canister. The Macron government 
decorated the police officer who led the unit that killed Redouane.

Fighting the Macron administration’s fascistic policies, including its 
policy of forcing workers and youth to remain at work and school and 
thus spread the coronavirus, requires the independent political 
mobilisation of the working class on a socialist and internationalist 
programme. The union bureaucracies and their political allies, including 
the big-business Socialist Party (PS) and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s 
Rebellious France (LFI) party are all integrated into the police-state 
apparatus.

While LFI official Danièle Obono criticised the “global security” bill 
for potentially encouraging “self-censorship” in France, Hervé Saulignac 
for the PS commented: “There are red lines that should not be crossed. 
Even [former conservative President Nicolas] Sarkozy never went that 
far.” These criticisms are hypocritical, however: it was the PS that set 
into motion the suspension of democratic rights, imposing a two-year 
state of emergency in 2015. Mélenchon’s legislative group voted for the 
state of emergency in the National Assembly at the time.

The “global security” law is in the direct continuity of the policy 
carried out by the PS, backed by the LFI, preparing the legal terrain 
for Macron to install a permanent state of emergency.

The twin threats of COVID-19 and the financial aristocracy’s drive to 
dictatorship pose vast challenges to workers and youth. Halting the 
virus at schools and workplaces worldwide requires the forming of safety 
committees—independent from the unions, which support the back-to-work 
drive—to inform workers and students, and press for a lock-down policy 
allowing them to safely shelter at home. Fighting the drive to 
dictatorship requires a socialist political movement, fighting to 
transfer power to such independent bodies of the working class in France 
and internationally.

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