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<h2 class="f2-p _balance-text f3 f2-ns f1-l lh-title ma0"
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<h2 class="f2-p _balance-text f3 f2-ns f1-l lh-title ma0"
style="line-height: 1.2em;">Macron prepares “global security”
law banning the filming of French police</h2>
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<div class="f7 normal black-60 mt1"><time
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<figure class="relative ma0 overflow-hidden dn-p">
<div class="relative overflow-hidden "><img class="db
relative center"
src="https://www.wsws.org/asset/65483863-875f-4abd-8ea5-1e122ce7dea1?rendition=image1280"
width="453" height="254"></div>
<figcaption class="db avenir f7 f6-m lh-title black-60 tc
pt3 ph3">Emmanuel Macron (en.kremlin.ru)</figcaption></figure>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
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<p>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.”</p>
<p>Fauvergue did not say it, but the target of the war waged
by the state is the people, and above all the working class.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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