After the proliferation of testimonies from demonstrators declaring that they had been arbitrarily arrested during the mobilizations against the pension reform, the Association for the Defense of Constitutional Liberties (Adelico) had seized the Paris administrative court last Wednesday, so that it enjoins the prefect to Paris, Laurent Nuñez, to “immediately stop” practicing “so-called preventive arrests in its policing policy”. On Monday, the administrative court rejected the association’s request, the applicants’ lawyer said on the same day.
For the applicant association, this “technique known as preventive arrests” infringes “the fundamental freedoms to come and go, to demonstrate, to assembly as well as to the right to security”.
The association will file an appeal against the decision
In its application for interim measures (emergency procedure), Adelico maintained that the arrests and police custody between March 16 and 20 in Paris had resulted “in more than 99% of cases” in “judicial decisions classification without follow-up”, demonstration according to her that “this policy of maintaining public order disregards the principles of necessity and proportionality”.
For the administrative court, neither the arrests nor the number of classifications without follow-up put forward by the association “are likely to establish that the prefect of police would have had recourse to preventive arrests (…) and not to arrests of people at against whom there are one or more plausible grounds for suspecting that they have committed or attempted to commit an offence”.
In this case, the placement in police custody “has the character of a judicial police operation and it is only for the courts to hear disputes arising on the occasion of such placement”, considers the judge referrals in its order, consulted by AFP. Consequently, the court ruled the request “inadmissible” because it did not come under “the jurisdiction of administrative justice”.
“It is a pity that the administrative court disputes the evidence of the policy of illegal and massive arrests, and that it refused to hold a hearing which would have precisely made it possible to debate it”, declared to AFP the lawyer for the applicant association, Me Jean-Baptiste Soufron, who intends to “resubmit” appeals “with a view to future demonstrations”.