a report denounces the “instrumentalization” of police custody for purposes of maintaining order
Arrest in Place d’Italie during the eleventh day of mobilization against the pension reform, in…
a report denounces the “instrumentalization” of police custody for purposes of maintaining order
Arrest in Place d’Italie during the eleventh day of mobilization against the pension reform, in Paris, on April 6, 2023. AGNES DHERBEYS/MYOP FOR “THE WORLD”
While new violence and numerous arrests (540 throughout the country, including 305 in Paris) punctuated the demonstrations of 1er-May, the Controller General of Places of Deprivation of Liberty (CGLPL) published, Wednesday, May 3, an investigation report on the police custody measures taken during a previous day of demonstrations against the pension reform, that of March 23.
This damning report highlights “serious violations of fundamental rights”guards “without legal basis” and shares his “deep concerns” in the face of this “trivialization of confinement”.
In a letter sent to the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, who received this report on April 17, the Comptroller General, Dominique Simonnot, is not content to note the “alarming deficiencies” detected in the work of the officers who carried out the arrests. She attributes much of the responsibility to ” instructions “ given by the Prefecture of Police and the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office, encouraging a m***ive use of arrests ” preventively”.
This approach “preventive” the maintenance of order, which is not provided for by any legal text, “thus reveals not only an instrumentalization of police custody measures for repressive purposes, but also a misuse of the judicial authority, whose constitutional role (…) is not to guarantee the legal certainty of police measures, a fortiori when they have knowingly been taken in disregard of the law”.
“Appeal without distinction”
To establish this observation, the CGLPL dispatched three teams of controllers to nine Parisian police stations the day after the demonstrations of March 23. They were able to visit the premises in which the detainees were held, talk to them and question certain police officers. They found a “significant number of procedures conducted in disregard of the standards and principles governing police custody, or even, in certain situations, in violation of the applicable texts. »
From “deficiencies” the most frequent are “the irregularity of the documents relating to the arrest” And “the indigence of the elements making it possible to characterize the offence”. In most procedures, “no detailed report setting out the context of the arrest and the elements likely to characterize the person’s involvement” is not trained, which deprives the judicial police officers of the information necessary to process the procedures.
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