Over the past two months, hundreds of thousands of people have marched in towns and cities across France over underfunded schools, the cost of living and police brutality. In the three weeks leading up to October 14, police detained 6,877 people at school blockades and marches, 86 percent of them minors. That was more than the number detained during 18 months of often violent Yellow Vest clashes that began in 2018.
The French government has been accused of using an anti-terror law adopted after the 2015 Paris attacks to keep several dozen people away from protests sweeping the country.
After peaceful rallies gave way to widespread rioting and looting on October 17, authorities began using special powers to bar people from further demonstrations without prior approval from judges. Lawyers and rights groups called it an abuse of power with dangerous consequences for individual liberties and the right to protest.
The restriction is an individual measure of administrative control and surveillance, known by the French acronym MICAS. People subject to the orders must report to a local police station weekly or daily, and sometimes twice a day. Breaking the restrictions can bring a three-year prison sentence and a 45,000-euro fine.
The law says the powers are intended solely to prevent acts of terrorism. Lawyers said that was clearly not the case with the current orders.
The government pointed to a fire that ravaged the town hall of Limoges on October 17, and to online calls to target symbols of capitalism and the state, as evidence of an intent to seriously disrupt public order by intimidating the population and the public authorities.
The decision to issue a MICAS order rests on intelligence reports and can target people with no criminal record. Critics said the orders clearly aimed at political activists, barring them from demonstrations in the hope of weakening the movement, and that authorities were trying to draw a direct link between protest and terrorist acts.
One critic said the government was either pretending the targets were terrorists because it had no other way to bar them from protests, or genuinely believed what happened on October 17 was terrorism, or both. The critic said it took nerve to treat political violence and looting as terrorism, particularly on the eve of commemorations for victims of the November 13 attacks.
A rapporteur said not all violence directed against the state, nor all political violence, is necessarily terrorist, according to a Mediapart journalist who attended the hearing. Protest calls, one critic said, could not be regarded as intended to sow terror, but as an expression of intense anger toward the ruling authorities and a means of placing them in great difficulty.
At later fast-tracked trials, most of those convicted turned out to be opportunistic looters with no political leaning, lawyers and rights groups said. For them, the episode marked a turning point in the policing of protest.
Rights groups also denounced the widespread use of police custody to deter student protesters who started the movement at high schools. They accused police of abusing minors held for up to 48 hours, alleging insults, beatings and the denial of food and sleep.
The MICAS orders followed other steps critics say have severely curtailed protest: outright bans on rallies, changes to routes and localised curfews. When attending a protest can mean tear gas, injury or jail, one critic said, quite a few people are likely to stay away.
The measures are a legacy of sweeping house arrest orders issued under a state of emergency declared in the early hours of November 14, 2015, after France’s deadliest terrorist attacks. Critics of the 2017 law that followed had warned that it left ample scope for abuse.