UN experts sound alarm at excessive use of force in French student protests
UN experts have condemned police crackdowns, warning they deter demonstrators from exercising their rights.
United Nations experts have expressed alarm at the “excessive use of force” by French authorities in dispersing the recent nationwide student protests.
“The scale of the arrests and detention, affecting several thousand people, mainly minors, appears disproportionate and deters demonstrators from exercising their freedoms of expression and peaceful assembly,” the four experts, mandated by the UN Human Rights Council, said in a statement on Wednesday.
They included Gina Romero, special rapporteur on the freedom of peaceful assembly, and Farida Shaheed, the UN expert on cultural rights.
The French government deployed 70,000 security forces and arrested 1,000 people during demonstrations on Saturday, which drew 410,000 protesters nationwide, France’s Interior Ministry said. A week earlier, public buildings were vandalised, hundreds of businesses were looted and 2,700 people were arrested, with Interior Minister Laurent Nunez vowing to be “extremely vigilant, extremely firm” to quell future unrest.