Four years after the last anti-breakers law, the government is considering introducing a crime of building barricades.
In the wake of the violence during the mobilization against the pension reform, the government announces that it is “thinking” about a new anti-breaker law. The Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin indeed renewed on Tuesday May 2 his will to write a new text, claiming “the strongest criminal sanctions against those who attack the forces of order”. A “barricade building offence” could, among other things, see the light of day, learned franceinfo.
His Justice colleague, Eric Dupond-Moretti, followed suit on Wednesday. “We are thinking about it, and I am meeting the Minister of the Interior on Friday, we will work together”, said the Keeper of the Seals on RTL. According to figures from Beauveau, 406 police officers or gendarmes were injured during the May Day demonstrations. “How many injuries and tragedies in our ranks, before providing the police with legal tools prohibiting these criminals from accessing any demonstration or gathering?”reacted for its part the union Unit-SGP.
Unsurprisingly, the prospect of a new anti-breakers law is being promoted by police unions. At the beginning of April, a few days after the clashes around the “mega-basin” of Sainte-Soline (Deux-Sèvres), as well as a particularly violent day of mobilization on March 23 against the pension reform, the Alliance union had demanded from Gérald Darmanin “the legal and technical means of preventing violence during demonstrations and punishing their perpetrators”. And the Minister of the Interior to approve: “Yes, we will have to come back to the anti-breakers law”.
A resurgence with each outbreak of violence
The possibility of a new text arouses, on the contrary, the hostility of the unions of magistrates and lawyers. “As soon as there is a social problem, a law is needed without questioning what already exists in the legal arsenal”, deplores Thibaut Spriet, national secretary of the Syndicate of the magistrature. He recalls that, since 2010, a law repressing participation in a group with a view to committing damage “constitutes the offense on which most of the arrests of the latest demonstrations are based”.“If we go further, we risk undermining the freedom to demonstrate”believes Nicolas Hervieu, jurist in public law.
The most recent anti-breaker law was enacted in April 2019 after several months of violent protest during the social crisis of “yellow vests”. Invalidated in part by the Constitutional Council, it nevertheless established the offense of concealing the face without legitimate reason in demonstration and authorized the searches of bags and vehicles, in and around processions. In the footsteps of May 68, the first anti-riot law established the controversial principle of collective criminal and financial responsibility for demonstrators. François Mitterrand had then castigated in 1970 a law which “prohibits the right to demonstrate and to assemble”. As soon as he was elected President of the Republic in 1981, he repealed it.