Even fascists have the right to demonstrate, by Thomas Legrand – Liberation

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The police headquarters, which wanted to ban a royalist conference and demonstration this weekend in Paris, at the request of Gérald Darmanin, was ruled on by the administrative court. So much the better: the Republic is strong enough to support a sparse procession of nostalgics for the old regime. And this decision legitimized the much more outrageous ban on anti-Macron “pans”.

The administrative court suspended the decrees of the Paris police headquarters (therefore of the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin) which aimed to ban a conference and a demonstration of the far right (royalist this time). And so much the better for public freedoms. The French Republic and its democracy are strong enough to support a handful of people nostalgic for the old regime colluding and parading around Paris. Two royalist demonstrations were therefore restored to their rights by the judge. On the other hand, a demonstration of nostalgics for Pétain, organized by the activist Yvan Benedetti, who has been convicted of multiple offenses in particular for reconstituting dissolved leagues, remains prohibited.

The judge is in his role. He discerned, not the ideological motives (in France one has the right to be a royalist and even a fan of the Marshal) but the potential disturbance to public order that these demonstrations could present. And in this matter, we must take legal tweezers and use prohibition only sparingly, because to prohibit a demonstration or an assembly is to practice justice a priori, that is to say to achieve to fundamental freedoms. The part of the left (and of the press) which protested against the authorization of the demonstration

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