The French government announced it would drop a hotly contested article in a security bill that recently passed the National Assembly after more than 100,000 people across France came out to protest.
Christophe Castaner, a member of President Emmanuel Macron’s ruling LREM party, told reporters Monday that the government would craft a “completely new writing” of the article, according to the Journal du Dimanche.
“We know that doubts still exist,” Castaner said. “We must listen to those doubts. … When such a misunderstanding continues to intensify on such a fundamental subject, we have a duty to collectively question ourselves.”
The bill in question, the Global Security Bill, will head to the Senate in December. Article 24, the bill’s most widely criticized section, which was dropped, banned the publication of images that could lead to the identification of law enforcement officers “with the intent to cause them harm, physically or mentally.”
The bill also strengthens the government’s ability to surveil the public, authorizing both the use of drones to record people in public and police body cameras to be livestreamed to authorities.
France has faced something of a reckoning since the death of George Floyd in the United States. The country’s “longstanding failure to fully integrate Muslim and African populations from its form colonies” have been exacerbated by a predominantly white police force that targets African and Arab youths for abusive arrests and has a “long track record” of deaths of minorities in custody, according to the New York Times. These failures came to a head last week after a video was published showing police officers beating Michel Zecler, a black music producer, in what AFP called “racial abuse.”
Four French police officers were charged Monday in connection to the assault on Zecler, according to the Washington Post. Two of the four were granted provisional release.
French authorities do not keep demographic statistics on the basis of race or religion, making it more difficult to prosecute systemic abuses or craft civil rights legislation like that which has been passed in the U.S.
Despite the promise of a rewrite, Castaner maintained that the purpose of the article must remain to better protect police with regard to journalists and everyday citizens who post images of law enforcement officers on social media, according to Bloomberg.
“France should be the country of no violence or any infringement of any freedom whatsoever,” Castaner said.
