Thousands of people on Saturday marched through Paris and in other French cities to decry the proposed extension of a state of emergency imposed after the Paris attacks in November last year.
Braving driving rain and shouting slogans including “state of emergency — police state,” the marchers protested loudly against a measure they see as curbing human rights.
Police put participation at 5,000, while organizers said about 20,000 people took part.
Photo: EPA
Protesters took to the streets in more than a dozen other cities, including Toulouse and Bordeaux in the south, in marches organized by unions, human rights organizations and other pressure groups.
Rights groups also reject a government plan to strip convicted French-born terrorists of their citizenship if they have a second nationality.
That proposal has already triggered the resignation of former French minister of justice Christiane Taubira, who stood down in protest over the plan this week after the constitutional reforms were presented to parliament.
French Parliament is due in the coming days to debate the state of emergency as French President Francois Hollande seeks parliamentary approval to extend the current three-month measure, which expires on Feb. 26.
The French Senate is to vote on the proposal on Feb. 9, followed by a vote in the French National Assembly on Feb. 16.
Concern has been growing about the state of emergency, introduced after coordinated gun and bomb attacks left 130 dead in Paris on Nov. 13.
France’s highest administrative court on Wednesday last week refused to lift the state of emergency.
The French Council of State ruled the “imminent danger justifying the state of emergency has not disappeared, given the ongoing terrorist threat and the risk of attacks.”
However, UN human rights experts last week said that the measures placed what they saw as “excessive and disproportionate” restrictions on key rights.
The protesters demanded an end to the state of emergency and the nationality proposal, measures they say “strike at our freedom in the name of hypothetical security.”
Marchers said they fear an open-ended state of emergency.
“Until when? The end of Daesh [the Islamic State]? Ten years? Never?” asked one woman, who gave her name as Chris, while another, Camille, said she feared that France is “experiencing a permanent coup d’etat.”
Despite the popular concern, a recent poll showed 70 percent of French back maintaining the state of emergency.
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