A new report published by New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that French police are party to abusing their power when dealing with black and Arab men and boys. The rights group said that police “conduct unwarranted and abusive identity checks” against the minorities. The 55-page report, “The Root of Humiliation: Abusive Identity Checks in France,” reveals that minority youth, including children as young as 13, are “subjected to frequent stops involving lengthy questioning, invasive body pat-downs, and the search of personal belongings.” HRW says that continuous stops of youth are arbitrary and have no semblance of purpose, except to harass the young minorities. The rights group in the report, which conducted extensive interviews with youth in France, said police often used insulting language and racial slurs as well as unnecessary force against the youth. “It's shocking that young black and Arab kids can be, and are, arbitrarily forced up against walls and manhandled by the police with no real evidence of wrongdoing,” said Judith Sunderland, senior Western Europe researcher at Human Rights Watch. “But if you are a young person in some neighborhoods in France, it's a part of life.” Under French law, police have wide discretion to carry out identity checks without any suspicion of criminal wrongdoing, including in transport hubs and in any area designated by a prosecutor. The stops are not systematically recorded by police, and those stopped do not receive any written documentation explaining or recording the incident. Most of those interviewed by Human Rights Watch had never been told the grounds for the many stops they had experienced. A 2009 study by the Open Society Justice Initiative and the French National Center for Scientific Research found that in France, black people were six times as likely as white people, and Arabs almost eight times as likely, to be stopped. Many of those interviewed by Human Rights Watch were convinced that their ethnicity, combined with a manner of dress associated with the banlieues – a term used to describe economically disadvantaged suburbs of major cities – played a major role. “Stopping people because of the color of their skin is a waste of police resources and breeds resentment against the police,” Sunderland said. “Police operations should be based on evidence and intelligence, not stereotypes.” BM ShortURL: http://goo.gl/cg9pm Tags: Arab, Black, France, HRW Section: Europe, Human Rights, Latest News
