23 July 2017 - 04:03 PM
Ferguson in Paris: A Historical March Against Police Violence
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Over 2,000 people peacefully took to the streets Saturday to demand justice for Adama Traore, a Black man killed in a police station in the suburbs of Paris one year ago on his 24th birthday.

Adama Traore was killed on his 24th birthday one year ago in a French police station.

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“This is a huge success,” told teleSUR Youcef Brakni, an activist at the Justice for Adama collective that organized the march with others like Ferguson in Paris also present.

“We made the bet we could call the march 30 kilometers away from Paris, in the suburbs, where the youth is actually suffering, so this is a historical record.”

In France, the suburbs — or “banlieues” — have historically been the home of marginalized minorities, mostly the generations of immigrants coming from Africa — a result of France's colonial past, one that France has fiercely refused to acknowledge and address.

On Saturday, people chanted the slogan “Without Justice, You'll Never Have Peace,” recalling the similar rallying cry “No Justice, No Peace,” that mobilized immigrants in France's first demonstrations against police brutality in the 1970s.

According to various rights group, around one person is killed each month by the police in France. The exact figures are unknown as French authorities refuse to keep an official record.

But decades later, anti-racist activists are hopeful that their efforts will eventually pay off, making Traore a national example against police brutality.

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On Wednesday, a court decided to reopen the case after a third autopsy revealed that the young man died from asphyxia just as his family had claimed from the start. After an intense legal struggle against the local attorney general in Pontoise, who first claimed that Traore died from a previous heart condition — despite the results of the autopsy mentioning the possibility of suffocation — Traore's case was transferred from the local court to Paris.

But the fight is far from over as was seen two years ago with the acquittal of the two policemen who responsible for the electrocution of two Muslim teenagers. The two teenagers were forced to hide in a transformer to avoid an identity check in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-Sous-Bois — just like Traore attempted to do last year. Their deaths sparked weeks of spontaneous riots in Paris suburbs in 2005.

This time, while the French judicial system has not improved much since then, Traore's family can at least rely on international support. In February, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights requested the French state to properly investigate three cases of police violence: Adama Traore, Theo Luhaka and François Bayiga.

The U.N. experts were "especially concerned" that these facts were "not isolated," quoting a recent report issued by the rights group ACAT that found that Black and Arab citizens were seven to eight times more likely to go through police identity checks than their white counterparts.

In France, police patrols can carry out identity checks on people with “suspicious” behaviors, but several studies have demonstrated that they are driven by racial profiling and used as a form of social control over minorities — rather than as a real security measure.

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Because the French Republic was founded on the abstract principles of universalism and equality, it has continued to fiercely deny the systemic reality of discrimination and racism against people from the former colonies. The country has refused to set up statistics based on ethnic identity.

But thanks to the work of rights groups and sociologists, this reality has become more difficult to deny. In 2015, a French appeal court condemned the French state for racial profiling in 13 cases of abusive identity checks.

According to the sociologist Didier Fassin, in a recent column issued in Le Nouvel Observateur, such identity checks are also the results of pressure on police officers to fulfill a quota — a policy implemented by conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy that continues to this day.

This strong emphasis on security became even more extreme with the terror attacks that hit the country in the past two years, giving police forces the ideal justification to ask for more resources. In May 2016, a survey for Le Parisien found that 82 percent of French citizens had “a positive opinion of the police,” and the French have welcomed the security measures — labeled a “French Patriot Act” by opponents — implemented after the terror attacks at the expense of their liberties.

France has been the only European country to impose a state of emergency after the attacks — recently extended for the sixth time in a row. Ironically, the state of emergency was first imposed during the Algerian war in the 1960s and for a second time during the 2005 riots in the Paris banlieues.

The terror attacks have further stigmatized the French Muslim populations living in the suburbs, amid growing Islamophobia across the country.

The Collective Against Islamophobia in France, or CCIF, has found violent actions against Muslims have spiked since the implementation of the state of emergency — a larger proportion from state institutions than from individuals (57 percent in 2015 and 63 percent in 2016).

“Over 4,400 police raids have been carried out under the pretext of the state of emergency, without a judicial warrant, and without grounds — as only 20 or so police raids have resulted in a formal investigation on terrorism charges,” told teleSUR Ibrahim Bechrouri from the CCIF.

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A total of 428 complaints about human rights violations were filed to the CCIF, as police raids can easily turn into a traumatic experience — waking up families in the middle of the night — or lead to dramatic consequences — with the person targeted by the police raid losing his or her job.

The racism of the police force reflects the growing racism in French society. While National Front's candidate Marine Le Pen received the support of a stunning 34 percent of voters in the last presidential race, more than 60 percent of police officers voted for her according to various surveys.

But while French authorities maintain a blind eye to the racial aspect of police violence, the issue has drawn more public attention in recent years, especially when police violence has affected more “visible” populations like militants protesting labor bills, or environmentalists. In 2014, a white environmentalist was killed by a military grenade during a protest against a hydroelectric project in Sivens, southern France.

In May, a report by Amnesty International accused the French state of abusing the state of emergency to repress social movements, with 155 protests prohibited over the past two years. Put under international scrutiny, the French state may feel pressured to properly address the issue of police violence, just like French cities are this summer thinking twice before they order "burkini bans" prohibiting Muslim women access to the beach that ridiculed them abroad.

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