The government is “thinking” about how to “adapt” to the “new uses” of “thugs” during the demonstrations, government spokesman Olivier Véran said on Wednesday, after Minister of Justice Éric Dupond-Moretti announced work on the subject with his Interior counterpart, Gérald Darmanin.
A new law?
“There is a double obligation. The obligation to guarantee the safety of those who demonstrate. And the obligation to ensure that those who are there to kill, to break, are put out of harm’s way and that they cannot participate in these events”, explained Olivier Véran during the report of the Council of Ministers.
“Does the legislative arsenal, does the law today allow this to be done? I would like to remind you that in 2019, we adopted an important text which made it possible to have improvements” but “we don’t had not gone completely to the end”, he continued, referring to the law adopted against the background of the yellow vests crisis and of which the Constitutional Council had however censored certain measures, including the possibility for the prefects to pronounce administrative bans on manifest.
“No answer at this stage” on the need for a new law, for the government spokesperson. But “in any case, we are thinking about it”, declared, in the morning on RTL, Éric Dupond-Moretti, specifying that he would meet Gérald Darmanin on Friday to “work together” on this subject.
Call for “moderation”
During the Council of Ministers, Emmanuel Macron made “the distinction between those who demonstrated, once again freely, and those who came to break, to kill. He recalled his support for the highly mobilized internal security forces” and ” sometimes even ostracized by part of the political class”, “on the side of the far left”, also declared Olivier Véran.
“If justice is seized, systematically, it is because we are in a functioning democracy. And if there are people who are released, it is because we are in a functioning democracy”, he also replied, questioned about the “attacks on fundamental rights” denounced by the General Controller of deprivation of liberty, Dominique Simonnot, for people arrested in Paris in demonstrations against the pension reform.
“I invite each and everyone to moderation in the face of the exceptional violence that we have witnessed,” he added.