PARIS, March 25 (Prensa Latina) Controversy over the police response to protests against pension reforms mounts in France today after an audio containing threats against protesters and criticism was released by a European organization.
In the last few hours, an audio obtained by media outlets such as Le Monde newspaper has been circulating in which members of an elite riot group threaten young people to send them to the hospital, in a scenario of growing tensions due to the mobilizations and strikes refusal of a reform already decided and without parliamentary vote.
The day before, the prefect of the Paris police, Laurent Nuñez, announced that he had referred the case in question to the General Inspectorate of the National Police, an internal control body that had already been convened by the authority after the publication of a video of an agent who punches a protester.
I am dismayed, these are serious statements that pose a very serious ethical problem, Nuñez admitted to the France 5 channel.
Also yesterday, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatovic, issued a statement expressing concern at the excessive use of force by the French authorities against demonstrators and calling on the government to respect the right to protest.
Mijatovic mentioned incidents when police officers and gendarmes were attacked by some people; however, it clarified that sporadic violence and other reprehensible acts committed during the marches do not justify the excessive use of force by state officials.
This Saturday, the press repeated the complaint of a railway worker who suffered the effects of a de-enclosure shell being fired off during a demonstration on Thursday, causing him to lose sight in one eye.
Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin on Friday defended police and gendarmes from what he described as unacceptable actions by some people he described as extreme leftists and chaos-mongers.
According to the headlines, the attacks include rocks, Molotov cocktails and pyrotechnic devices, leaving more than 400 uniformed officers injured in recent days, many of them during Thursday’s protests and late-night riots.
Local marches have been called for today to continue the movement to demand that President Emmanuel Macron withdraw pension reform.