Thousands March Against French Police Bill
Thousands of people marched in Paris and across France on Sunday against a draft law that would give police and gendarmes a legal presumption they acted in legitimate self-defence when they use a firearm – a change opponents have labelled a “permis de tuer,” or licence to kill, and that now goes to the Senate after clearing the National Assembly in July.
The text does not create a new right to shoot but it changes what a court is invited to assume after an officer fires. Today an investigation still has to establish whether the shot was necessary and proportionate.
The bill would start from the opposite end: the officer is presumed to have been in the right unless that presumption is overturned. Defenders say that would stop colleagues being treated as suspects, or held, as a matter of routine. Critics say it reverses the burden of proof in the gravest cases a state can face – the killing of a civilian by someone who already holds a monopoly on legitimate force.
Mathilde Panot of La France Insoumise told the Paris crowd: “The police kill already.” A republic, she said, cannot organise “police impunity” or hand one category of citizens “the right of life or death over other citizens.” Amal Bentousi walked with them. Her brother Amine was shot in the back by police in Seine-Saint-Denis in 2012. She called the bill a “licence to execute.”
Amnesty International, the magistrates’ union and the League of Human Rights have stood on the same route. In Marseille, Amnesty’s Cédric Picard said the fear was simple: “police violence would only grow.” A school student who gave his name as Hugo said France already ranked among the worst for abuse; the law, he thought, would make that worse.
Police counted 4,500 people in Lyon and 3,700 in Toulouse, with scores of other cities holding rallies the same weekend. A petition on the Assembly’s own website passed 730,000 names but A parliamentary committee set it aside in July – a reminder that public volume does not bind the calendar.
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez had told forces on Saturday to be “particularly vigilant.” In Rennes, officials said eight people were arrested and three officers injured after projectiles were thrown. Most of the day elsewhere passed as a political argument in the street, not a riot.
The vote lands on ground already mined. French law on police firearms was tightened after earlier crises; each new shooting renews the fight over whether officers are unprotected or untouchable. Related proceedings still sit in the courts, including the scheduled trial of a policeman over the 2023 killing of 17-year-old Nahel in Nanterre – a death that set off nights of unrest and fixed, for a generation of marchers, the image of a traffic stop that ended with a bullet. Sunday’s bill is seen as an attempt to write a presumption that would apply the next time an officer pulls a trigger.
If the Senate agrees, judges will be asked to begin from the officer’s good faith. If it refuses, the Assembly text dies or returns in another form. Either way the country has been told, in public, what each camp thinks a shot fired by the state should mean: a last resort that must be proved, or an act that is lawful until someone proves it was not.
