French activists concerned about abuse of power under state of emergency

Activists and lawyers in France have voiced concern about the government’s "abuse of power" under a nationwide state of emergency declared following recent terrorist attacks in Paris.

On November 13, assailants struck at least six different venues in and around Paris, leaving 130 people dead and over 350 others injured. France introduced the state of emergency following the horrendous assaults, which were claimed by the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group.

However, many in France’s legal system have expressed worries about the abuse of the new measures adopted under the state of emergency, including empowering the police to keep people in their homes without trial, searching houses without judicial approval and blocking suspicious websites.

The measures also include a ban on public demonstrations and allow authorities to dissolve groups inciting any acts that seriously affect public order in France.

A national human rights association has filed a complaint with France’s highest court over the issue.

According to latest reports, French police have conducted 2,575 searches, and 354 people have been confined at their homes since the beginning of the state of emergency.

Some 25 house arrest orders were also issued for those who had planned to protest the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference, also known as COP21, in Le Bourget, north of Paris despite the ban on protests under the emergency state.

On Friday, people staged a protest to draw attention to the issue.

“We came to support a comrade who has been under house arrest since Nov. 29 because he is an ecologist,” said Nicolas Galepides, of the SUD union, adding, “I’m flagged. I’m not violent. We are talking about social violence, our violence against the climate. It’s beginning to get difficult to defend our liberties.”

On Tuesday, French police cuffed and jailed a man because he was 40 minutes late for one of his four appointments a day at a police station. He had been flagged as a radical, but never convicted of links to extremists.

John Dalhuisen, the director of Amnesty International’s Europe and Central Asia program, said last week that the new measures in France “provide for a sweeping extension of executive powers at the expense of essential human rights safeguards.”

Yasser Louati, a spokesman for the Collective against Islamophobia in France, an anti-racist group, said the state of emergency has unfairly targeted Muslims.

“The raids have disproportionately targeted people of Islamic faith with overt brutality. We’ve collected evidence of 50 cases of abuse – and these are just the ones we know about – where police hurled racist abuse at families, women were assaulted and one even miscarried,” he said.

“When raids are conducted on erroneous intelligence – 90 percent of the raids have found nothing – why humiliate people? This is a government response that’s no more than a show of force. But the threat isn’t Muslims, it is terrorists.”

Last week, the French government drew up a draft law to extend the state of emergency for up to six months from the current three-month limit.

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