France: Systemic Police Discrimination Requires Reforms
Police in France engage in a longstanding and widespread practice of ethnic profiling that constitutes systemic discrimination, a group of six French and international human rights organizations said today, as they initiated the first class action against the French state over the practice. The organizations sent a letter of formal notice on January 27, 2021, to the prime minister and the interior and justice ministers to press for structural reforms and concrete measures to put an end to discriminatory police practices.
Despite incontrovertible evidence that French police have engaged in systematic discrimination during identity checks for many years, and commitments by successive governments to address the problem, nothing has changed, the organizations said. The class action suit is needed to end this stigmatizing, humiliating, and degrading practice.
