NGOs Demand France End Racial Profiling in Police Checks

Amnesty International France, Human Rights Watch, Open Society Justice Initiative, the Community House for Solidarity Development (MCDS), Pazapas and the Equality, Anti-Discrimination, Justice, Interdisciplinary Network (REAJI) are the six NGOs engaged in this cause.

They have sent the Prime Minister Jean Castex and the Ministers Gérald Darmanin of the Interior and Éric Dupond-Moretti of Justice a four-month formal notice. This period could be used by the French authorities to exchange and find concrete solutions to put an end to these controls that they consider "discriminatory". If this formal notice period does not lead to any decision, the organizations threaten to take legal action.

For these organizations, which have provided evidence of identity checks based on appearance in several cities in France, "the police use too broad, insufficiently controlled powers to carry out discriminatory and abusive identity checks based on a person’s physical characteristics associated with a real or supposed origin".

Specifically, the organizations demand "the modification of the Code of Criminal Procedure to explicitly prohibit discrimination in identity checks, exclude administrative identity checks and circumscribe police powers so that checks can only be based on an objective and individualized suspicion"; the creation of a system for recording and evaluating data on identity checks, and the provision of proof of control to any person checked.

"It is high time that the authorities put an end to these abuses... The government must initiate a real consultation to carry out the necessary deep reforms," they added.