“No one move!” » This was in essence the reaction of the executive to the serious incidents which recently involved supporters: stone throwing at the Olympique Lyonnais bus in Marseille, Nazi salutes and racist cries from Lyon supporters, death of a Nantes supporter on the sidelines of Nantes-Nice last weekend – a case in which a VTC driver was indicted.
On Monday, the Minister of Sports, Amélie Oudéa-Castera, cried out “Basta, that’s enough!” »advocating “a global and extraordinarily determined response”. What his interior counterpart, Gérald Darmanin, translated on Thursday into an order prohibiting the travel of supporters for eight Ligue 1 and Coupe de France matches this weekend.
Friday, the Council of State lifted the bans concerning the four meetings for which it had been contacted by the National Association of Supporters (ANS), which considered these orders “grossly illegal and unjustifiable”. The summary judge ruled that they were “a serious and manifestly disproportionate attack on the fundamental freedoms of these people”.
Failure of “all-repressive”
Should we still grant these freedoms to supporters who cause incidents and mobilize significant police forces? In reality, they have been undermined for a long time with the use of prefectural decrees prohibiting these migrations, without much discernment or concern for their own legality – for example when they invoke fanciful motives or imaginary rivalries.
Often published very late in order to avoid their invalidation by legal recourse, these decrees penalize those who had planned their trip, and harm the security of matches by sending visitors back among the local public due to the closure of the reserved stands, while by mobilizing more law enforcement to enforce them than would have been necessary to accompany the groups.
The feeling of being treated as sub-citizens – also fueled by administrative stadium bans or collective punishments such as grandstand closures and closed doors – obviously does not justify supporters causing excesses, which have been on the rise since the return of the public to the stadiums after confinements. Certain “ultra” groups must confront the violent excesses of some of their members.
However, dismissing all supporters in the same discredit is probably obtaining the support of the majority of media commentators and public opinion, certainly not solving the problem. There “all-repressive policy”of which a parliamentary report concluded in June 2020 that “failure”is less than ever the solution, and criminalizing fanism amounts to evading the responsibility of public authorities.
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