THE FRENCH PEOPLE PROTEST the 'Global Security Bill'.

This is Global Security Problem of Repression by Government in the context of Covid Lock-down.

The French National Assembly is currently examining, with the usual fast track procedure that prevents and marginalises parliamentary debate, a bill called "global security". This law, filed on October 20 by a group of MPs from the presidential party, couched in the best neoliberal rhetoric, aims to provide a new framework for security actions that its drafters promise will be "inventive and innovative".

With these two adjectives, "inventive and innovative", the legislators are probably referring to the three highly controversial articles of the proposal that concern the recording and dissemination of images in the context of police actions. Perfectly in line with the trend of the times – and by consequence, we are sorry to have it observed, with very little inventiveness and innovation – these articles impose a general surveillance for the many and a privileged disclosure for the few, as they provide for ground mass surveillance, air mass surveillance and a ban on documenting police action.

Article 21 of the law authorizes the police and gendarmes to film their interventions by "mobile cameras", to access the images they have recorded and to transmit them in real time to the command post; article 22 proposes to authorize the deployment of drones to monitor public space; article 24 proposes to prohibit the public from disseminating "the image of the face or any other element of identification of an official of the national police or of a soldier of the national gendarmerie when acting within the framework of 'a police operation' and when this dissemination is made 'with the aim of harming his physical or mental integrity' ”.

These provisions add fuel to the flames of an increasingly tense relationship between the police and the population. The police, who we must be clear about, have in recent years been impoverished and forced to mechanically optimize their performance through drastic neoliberal reforms, and who are also exhausted by the fight against terrorism, have been used in recent years as an instrument for the repression of social discontent. Faced with the escalation in social protest, in particular from the Gilets Jaunes, the government has explicitly chosen to demand from the Police a “confrontational approach” in the handling of demonstrations.

As the association La Quadrature du Net explains, the confrontational approach “aims above all to dissuade the population from taking part in demonstrations, whether by psychological exhaustion of the participants (practice of the trapping, blocking or filtering of the entries and exits of the march route, teargassing, body searches, abusive behavior) or by physical violence (LBD, grenades, charges)”. This policy has given way in the last two years to a fully fledged state violence, which caused an estimated 6,000 persons injured, 318 severe head injuries sustained by protesters; the hands of five protesters torn off by explosive grenades; thirty five people blinded by being shot with “flashbang grenades”, as well as three deaths.

In addition to clashes with demonstrators, in recent years the police have multiplied discriminatory, often violent, racial profiling, focused on the population of Arab or black origin; they were recently sent to break in, search and arrest four ten (ten!) year old children on charges of being apologists for terrorism, who were then released a few hours later; and, what is more, they have killed 42 people since 2019, including the delivery boy, Cédric Chouvat, killed in Paris by ventral tackling and strangulation following his "outrageous" attempt to ... film his arrest.

The situation is so serious and beyond control that the Council of Europe through its Commissioner for Human Rights, the European Parliament and the UN have all expressed concern and strongly condemned the disproportionate use of police violence in France. https://www.opendemocracy.net/.../frances-global.../