By Juliette Jabkhiro and Yiming Woo
PARIS (Reuters) – Just over two weeks after being arrested at a spontaneous protest in Paris, student Louise Thomas took to the streets again during an eleventh day of nationwide demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform.
The 23 year-old political science student was holding a sign that read “24 hours in police custody for exercising my right to protest”.
Thomas told Reuters that on March 20, policemen chased her and other protesters, hit them with sticks before taking them to a police station for the night. She was set free the next morning with no charges, she said.
“The goal was to intimidate us, to prevent us from taking to the streets,” she said. “But I’m going back because I don’t want to be bullied, I want to exercise my freedom to protest as I like.”
Thomas has been going to protests since 2020, but this was the first time she had to go through what she described as a “traumatic experience”.
“In my cell there were puddles of urine. I couldn’t sleep, I was in pain because of my bruises.”
Hers is not an isolated case, according to rights groups Amnesty International and France’s Human Rights League (LDH).
“We have seen large-scale arrests of protesters, that we describe as abusive,” said LDH’s director Patrick Baudouin.
A justice ministry spokesperson said 1,971 pension reform protesters have been held in police custody since March 15, 383 of which have been brought to justice.
The government has said that protests have been infiltrated by radicalised, violent protesters that put citizens, policemen and firefighters’ safety at risk.
For Thomas, the way French authorities have handled protests is counterproductive.
“Around me, people who were not at all interested in the issue are now concerned with police violence,” she said.
(Reporting by Juliette Jabkhiro and Yiming Woo; editing by Barbara Lewis)
