Paris
In a first for France, six nongovernmental organizations launched a class-action lawsuit Wednesday against the French government for alleged systemic discrimination by police officers carrying out identity checks.
The organizations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, contend that French police use racial profiling in ID checks, targeting Black people and people of Arab descent.
They served Prime Minister Jean Castex and France’s interior and justice ministers with formal legal notice of demands for concrete steps and deep law enforcement reforms to ensure that racial profiling does not determine who gets stopped by police.
The lead lawyer in the case, Antoine Lyon-Caen, said that the legal action is not targeting individual police officers but “the system itself that generates, by its rules, habits, culture, a discriminatory practice.”
27 January 2021, 14:19 UTC
France: Systemic Police Discrimination Requires Reforms
Groups Initiate Class Action Suit on Discriminatory Identity Checks
Police in France engage in a longstanding and widespread practice of ethnic profiling that constitutes systemic discrimination, a group of six French and international human rights organizations said today, as they initiated action the first class action against the French state over the practice. The organizations sent a letter of formal notice on January 27, 2021, to the prime minister and the interior and justice ministers to press for structural reforms and concrete measures to put an end to discriminatory police practices.
Despite incontrovertible evidence that French police have engaged in systematic discrimination during identity checks for many years, and commitments by successive governments to address the problem, nothing has changed, the organizations said. The class action suit is needed to end this stigmatizing,
PARIS (AP) In a first for France, six nongovernmental organizations launched a class-action lawsuit Wednesday against the French government for alleged systemic discrimination by police officers carrying out identity checks.
The organizations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, contend that French police use racial profiling in ID checks, targeting Black people and people of Arab descent.
They served Prime Minister Jean Castex and France’s interior and justice ministers with formal legal notice of demands for concrete steps and deep law enforcement reforms to ensure that racial profiling does not determine who gets stopped by police.
The lead lawyer in the case, Antoine Lyon-Caen, said that the legal action is not targeting individual police officers but the system itself that generates, by its rules, habits, culture, a discriminatory practice.”
PARIS In a first for France, six nongovernmental organizations launched a class-action lawsuit Wednesday against the French government for alleged systemic discrimination by police officers carrying out identity checks. The organizations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, contend that French police use racial profiling in ID checks, targeting Black people and people of Arab descent. They served Prime Minister Jean Castex and France s interior and justice ministers with formal legal notice of demands for concrete steps and deep law enforcement reforms to ensure that racial profiling does not determine who gets stopped by police. The lead lawyer in the case, Antoine Lyon-Caen, said that the legal action is not targeting individual police officers but the system itself that generates, by its rules, habits, culture, a discriminatory practice.
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