The Economist (20201205) by calibre

Author:calibre
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, pdf
Tags: news, The Economist
Publisher: calibre
Published: 2020-12-04T01:24:19+00:00

The point of Article 24, according to Gérald Darmanin, the hard-line interior minister who drafted it (presumably with Mr Macron’s initial approval), is to protect the police from attempts to identify and target individuals, whether physically or on social media. French policemen regularly get online threats. In 2016 a police officer and a police employee were stabbed to death in front of their three-year-old son in Magnanville, a town north-west of Paris. Investigators found a list of names of police officers, among other figures, on the perpetrator’s computer.

The French media and others worried about press freedom, however, cried foul. An editorial in Le Monde, a newspaper, called Article 24 “pernicious”. Ten deputies from Mr Macron’s party, La République en Marche (LREM), voted against the bill, and 30 more abstained. On November 28th tens of thousands of people took to the streets of cities across France to protest. Even Macronistes are concerned about the president’s drift to the right on security matters.

At first, the government tried to defend Article 24. Faced with a groundswell of hostile opinion, however, Mr Macron on November 30th told parliamentarians at a crisis meeting at the Elysée Palace to rewrite the article completely. “It’s not a very glorious way of getting out of the situation,” says Roland Lescure, an LREM deputy. “But at least it’s clear and quick, and a way of saying ‘sorry, we got it wrong, let’s go back to the drawing board.’”

Mr Macron’s U-turn over Article 24 may now defuse the tension over press freedom. But the events that helped to prompt the reversal, and in particular Mr Zecler’s beating, will require a longer-term policy response. France does not collect data on its citizens’ ethnicity, so it is difficult to know the scale of racial discrimination. But an official study in 2016 found that a young man “perceived as black or Arab” is far more likely to be stopped for an identity-card check than anyone else. Mr Darmanin, who now finds himself under internal pressure, has promised to come up with a proper review of training and diversity, as well as police oversight and discipline. It may have taken a particularly nasty case, but the problem of racism among the French police is at least beginning to be acknowledged. ■

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.