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.”
The issue of racial profiling by French police has been debated for years, including but not only the practice of officers performing identity checks on young people who are often Black or of Arab descent and live in impoverished housing projects.
Assa Traore, centre, sister of Adama Traore attends a demonstration against a security law that would restrict sharing images of police on Nov. 28, 2020 in Paris. Adama Traore was a Black man killed in police custody in France, whose case has mobilized broad anger against police brutality and racial injustice. (Francois Mori/The Associated Press)
Serving notice is the obligatory first step in a two-stage lawsuit process. The law gives French authorities four months to talk with the NGOs about meeting their demands. If the parties behind the lawsuit are left unsatisfied after that time, the case will go to court, according to one of the lawyers, Slim Ben Achour.