French police responds to protests against retirement reform

Havana, March 25 (RHC) The controversy over the police response to the protests against the retirement reform increases today in France after the release of an audio with threats to protesters and criticism from a European body.

In the last hours, an audio obtained by the newspaper Le Monde circulated, in which members of an elite riot group are heard threatening young people with sending them to the hospital, in a scenario of growing tension due to the mobilizations and strikes in rejection of a reform already adopted and without a parliamentary vote.

The day before, the prefect of the Paris Police, Laurent Nuñez, announced that he had transferred the case in question to the General Inspectorate of the National Police, an internal control body that had already been summoned by the authority after the disclosure of a video of an agent beating a protester.

The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatovic, expressed concern in a statement about the excessive use of force by French authorities against demonstrators and called on the Government to respect the right to protest.

Mijatovic mentioned incidents in which police officers and gendarmes were targeted by some people; however, it clarified that sporadic violence and other reprehensible acts committed during marches do not justify the excessive use of force by State agents.
This Saturday, the press echoed the complaint of a railway worker, who on Thursday during a demonstration would have suffered the consequences of the launch of a "de-enclosure" grenade, causing him to lose vision in one eye.

The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, defended the police and gendarmes on Friday before what he described as unacceptable actions of some people, whom he framed as the extreme left and the sowers of chaos.

According to the headline, the attacks include stones, Molotov cocktails and pyrotechnic devices, with more than 400 uniformed officers injured in recent days, a good part of them during the protests and the nighttime riots on Thursday.

For today, local marches were called to continue the movement demanding that President Emmanuel Macron withdraw the retirement reform. (Source: Prensa Latina)