NGOs denounce facial checks carried out by the French police which do not respect international human rights law. They refer matters to international authorities.
“These abusive and illegal identity checks, widespread across the country and deeply rooted in police practices, constitute systemic racial discrimination,” says Amnesty International France. The associations behind the initiative are the Community House for Solidarity Development (MCDS), Pazapas, the Equality, Anti-discrimination, Interdisciplinary Justice Network (Reaji) and Human Rights Watch. The organizations want the United Nations to recognize “the systemic nature of the problem of ethnic profiling in France, and explain the specific measures that the French government should take” to put an end to it. “Face checks target in particular young blacks and Arabs or those perceived as such, including children sometimes as young as ten years old,’ denounces the NGO, which relies on several research studies on this subject.“The State has not taken any measures to deal with the problem”, despite the decision of the Council of State in October which confirms the existence of this discrimination.