France: Amnesty report damns "effective impunity" of police officers
01 March 2005
On 6 April 2005, Amnesty International published a report on the "effective impunity" that police officers enjoy in France with regard to cases involving shootings, deaths in custody or torture and ill-treatment. The report identifies a number of factors which contribute to this situation. These can be loosely divided into a) structural issues pertaining to law enforcement activities and the police, b) questions arising from the biased functioning of the criminal justice system, and c) questions of accountability.
Under the first heading (a), there is "the lack of prompt legal access for an increasing number of persons detained for wide range of alleged offences or crimes" including organised crime or terrorism; the failure to respect the rights of people held in police custody; a distorted "esprit de corps" that encourages cover-ups and efforts to obstruct the identification of officers responsible for certain acts; and the failure by internal police complaints mechanisms to investigate allegations of ill-treatment, disputed shootings or deaths in custody "promptly, thoroughly and impartially".
With regards to the failings of the criminal justice system (b), the report highlights the criminal justice system's failure to address allegations of racist abuse or discriminatory conduct by law enforcement officers adequately (as the offences are often accompanied by racist and/or discriminatory behaviour); the failure by prosecution services to bring effective prosecutions against law enforcement officers accused of serious human rights violations; questionable interpretations of notions of "legitimate defence", "necessity" and of lack of training to justify lenient sentencing "which does not reflect the gravity of offences", or acquittals; and the lack of adequate appeal mechanisms.
The difficulty that victims of police abuses experience when seeking judicial redress also involve accountability and transparency (c), or the lack of these. Here, the Amnesty report focuses on the difficulty of registering complaints against police officers and the frequent use of counter-claims to intimidate plaintiffs (see Statewatch Vol. 14 no. 6); the failure to establish an independent mechanism to investigate serious human rights violations by law enforcement officers; and the failure by courts to publish reasons for their decisions. The authors note that, in almost all of the cases brought to their attention, the people on the receiving end of police violence are from ethnic minority backgrounds. Although this is not presented as "evidence" of "institutional racism", it is deemed to demonstrate the existence of:
a pattern, whereby reckless conduct has taken place, or a "series of blunders" to use a phrase common in the courts to justify light or nominal sentences - have been predominantly made against such persons.
This is viewed as a factor that heightens mistrust between people living in "sensitive areas" (where most of the alleged police abuses take place) and the police.
The report outlines a number of cases (both recent and more dated) and of the judicial proceedings that they have given rise to, to illustrate the failings in various stages of the justice system with regards to illegal acts carried out by the police, which give rise to an "effective impunity" for officers which, among other things, contravenes France's international human rights commitments.
The report is available in English and in French