The Secretary of State for Citizenship, Sonia Backès, announced this Wednesday in the Senate that a demonstration organized next Sunday in Paris by Action Française would be banned, in accordance with the instructions of Gérald Darmanin. On Tuesday, the Minister of the Interior had explained that with the prohibitions issued automatically by the prefects of any demonstration “of the ultra-right or the extreme right”, it will then be up to “the judge to know whether the case law will make it possible to hold these events.
“A demonstration in homage to Joan of Arc, at Opéra, carried by ultra-right groups, will be banned by the Paris police headquarters”, announced Sonia Backès during questions to the government in the Senate, responding to Senator PS de Paris David Assouline. This demonstration is organized at the call of the royalist movement Action française.
Demonstrations automatically prohibited
Sonia Backès’ announcement is the first translation of the instruction given on Tuesday to the prefects by the Minister of the Interior to henceforth ban any demonstration “of the ultra-right or the extreme right”. The unprohibited demonstration on Saturday in the streets of Paris by a “May 9 committee” made up of ultra-right activists, most of them with their faces hidden and wearing Celtic crosses, sparked a lively controversy. The Minister of the Interior issued a circular, consulted by AFP, entitled “prohibition of demonstrations and gatherings of the ultra-right”.
In this instruction dated this Wednesday, Gérald Darmanin asks the prefects “to take the necessary measures without delay to prevent such gatherings and demonstrations from happening again”. “You will pay particular attention to declarations of demonstrations made by individuals from dissolved groups, calling for hatred against others or claiming violent action”.
“You will take, continues the Minister, by decree the necessary measures to ban these demonstrations in order to prevent in particular the risks of material disturbances to public order, calls for violence against groups of people, parades and demonstrations of masked people, the reconstitution of dissolved groups, the denial of crimes against humanity”. And this, concluded Gérald Darmanin, “so that the images seen in Paris (last Saturday, editor’s note) do not reproduce themselves in any case”.