Politicians and protesters in the French city of Strasbourg are up in arms over police efforts to stop the display of anti-NATO flags days ahead of a summit of the alliance.
“Scandalous and intolerable,” says Daniel-Cohn Bendit, co-president of the Greens in the European Parliament and a well known figure in both French and German politics.
“Completely illegal,” says Patrick Wachsmann, a law professor at the University of Strasbourg and a specialist in civil liberties.
Even the local authority for the eastern Bas-Rhine region has distanced itself from the police action. In a statement issued late on Monday, it denied having issued orders to the police to take down banners displayed from householders’ windows.
The battle of the flags started when police officers started visiting the homes of local residents who were flying flags bearing a rainbow logo and the slogan “No to NATO” from their windows.
Officers turned up at Christian Grosse’s house at the beginning of last week and told him they had received orders to ask people to take the flags down.
“It was my son who saw them,” Grosse said. “They told him ‘Either you take it down, or we take it down.’”
His son did as he was told, Grosse said, “but I put it back up the very next morning”
Grosse, a member of the local communist party, said several other local residents had received similar visits from the police.
Marie-George Buffet, secretary general of the French communist party, has used Grosse’s experience as a rallying point, appealing to people to hang out the same flag all across France.
The controversy comes amid moves to tighten security in the city ahead of the April 3-April 4 NATO summit.
Buffet accused the French government of wanting to transform the city into a bunker.
Francois Bayrou, leader of France’s centrist Democrat Movement, also condemned the police measures as an unjustified attack on freedom of expression.
“It is wrong not to respect peaceful freedom of expression,” he said. “I don’t see what is wrong with reminding people that not everybody favors France being in NATO.”
Wachsmann said the measures were “shocking” and all the more surprising because they were not covered by any existing law.
If the authorities had in fact forcibly removed one of the flags in question it would have been a “grossly illegal” and liable to legal redress in the courts, he said.
Even the security measures setting up “red zones” during the summit that restricted freedom of movement in parts of the city were not covered by any existing law, he said.
Any Strasbourg resident could take legal action against the measures, which involve local people being issued with badges and being checked as the come and go from the zones, he said.
Political leaders will converge on the German town of Baden-Baden to mark the 60th anniversary of the creation of the NATO, before crossing the border for talks in Strasbourg.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS