"France bans citizens from filming and identifying violent police officers"

"PARIS — Against a backdrop of street protest—even in the midst of a COVID lockdown—and increasing police violence and repression, France Tuesday passed the draconian Global Security Law which could make it an offense punishable by a year in jail and a 45,000 euro fine to film, post, and identify police officers committing violent actions.

The members of President Emmanuel Macron’s LREM party, whose title La République En Marche claims that they are concerned about rights and liberties, on Tuesday morning watched films of the police brutally rousting homeless people from Place de la République, the square commemorating these rights. On Tuesday afternoon they voted in favor of the law, claiming that there was no contradiction between the two events. Even the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, in charge of police intervention, pronounced the use of force in this case 'shocking,' while Macron’s own former speechwriter termed the sequence 'hypocrisy without end.'

The event began Monday night with police roughly dismantling a homeless encampment at République, an event that was filmed by activists and widely broadcast. Militant defenders of the homeless then marched to Hôtel de Ville, the Paris City Hall, in protest, and were dispersed by police using tear gas. Also gassed and picked out as a target by police was a web journalist Rémy Busine, whose internet site Brut (Raw) has often featured police beatings, including those in République in 2016 of the movement Nuit Debout, or Up All Night, and of the Gilets Jaunes (the Yellow Vests), the people’s movement protesting the disenfranchisement of rural and peripheral areas. At the Trocadéro, across from the Eiffel Tower, on the weekend before the global security law was voted on, French journalists spoke out at a rally claiming that they were now vulnerable to jail and fines for simply covering demonstrations."