07/10/2023
Belle Carter
Parts of the country face a sea of protests after 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk was shot and killed by a police officer in a Paris suburb. Riots have gotten out of control, spreading with astounding speed and intensity from major cities and suburbs to the countryside, with demonstrators frequently clashing with police.
The timing of the passing of the bill could not have been worse, experts argue. Currently, the police are having a hard time mitigating the uprising. Could this legislation turn the country into a police state?
Macron argued at the time that the bill was meant to protect police officers from increasingly violent protestors. He expanded police authority via technology, threatening a shutdown of social media platforms, as he claims that protestors are filming, posting and organizing on apps like TikTok, Snapchat and Telegram.
This totalitarian form of governance is not new under Macron's rule. In 2021, the New York Times reported that the French Parliament passed a bill that broadened the powers of municipal police forces, expanded the police's ability to use drones to monitor citizens in public and toughened sentences for people found guilty of assaulting officers.
One of the most arduously debated measures criminalized the act of helping identify officers with the intent to harm them.
Gerald Darmanin, the Interior minister who championed the bill, told lawmakers at the time that it would be France's shame if it failed to prevent people with malicious intent from publicly spreading identifying information or pictures of security forces.
"Police officers and gendarmes are children of the Republic, and they must be protected because they protect us every day," Darmanin said.
"In the hands of an authoritarian government, such a law would become a dangerous weapon of surveillance and repression of the population," Cecile Coudriou, the head of Amnesty International France, said in a statement at the time.
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