The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has found France guilty of discrimination over a police identity check in 2011, ruling in favour of a French citizen of North African origin who was stopped three times in 10 days without clear justification.
In its judgment published on Thursday, the court said there was a “presumption of discriminatory treatment” against Karim Touil and that “the government failed to rebut it”.
The judges said they were “well aware of the difficulties faced by police officers who must decide quickly and sometimes without clear internal guidelines whether there is a threat to public order or safety”.
But in Touil’s case, they concluded there was no “objective and reasonable justification” for the stops.
France was found to have violated Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits discrimination, taken together with Article 8, on the right to private and family life.
The state must now pay Touil 3,000 euros in moral damages.
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Five claims rejected
The case dates back more than a decade and involved six French men of African or North African origin, who said they were victims of racial profiling during identity checks in 2011 and 2012.
The men – from cities including Marseille, Roubaix and Besançon – first brought their cases before French courts but lost. In 2017, they turned to the ECHR, which ensures respect for the European rights convention in 46 countries.
They argued the stops violated their rights to privacy and freedom of movement and called on the court to push France to introduce safeguards against discriminatory policing, such as written receipts for every identity check.
The six were part of a larger group of 13 men who launched legal action more than a decade ago, claiming they were unfairly targeted during police stops – sometimes accompanied by pat-downs, rude language or disrespectful behaviour.
Five of the six applicants lost their ECHR case. The court ruled that the police checks they experienced were not proven to be discriminatory and said it found no evidence of a broader structural failure.
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Previous rulings
French courts had partially agreed with the plaintiffs in earlier proceedings. In 2015, the Paris court of appeal found in favour of five men and ordered the state to pay them 1,500 euros each in compensation.
In 2016, France’s highest court, the Cour de cassation, upheld three of those rulings – marking the first time the state had been definitively condemned over identity checks of this nature.
Six of the men whose claims were not upheld decided to escalate the matter to the Strasbourg court.
Increase in identity checks
The decision comes days after new figures showed a sharp rise in identity checks in France over the past eight years.
A study by the French rights ombudsman, Claire Hédon, revealed that 26 percent of people surveyed in 2024 had been stopped at least once by police or gendarmes in the previous five years – up from 16 percent in 2016.
Young men perceived as Arab, black or North African were four times more likely than the rest of the population to be stopped and 12 times more likely to face a more intrusive check involving searches or orders to leave an area.
More than half of those stopped said they were not given a reason. Nearly one in five described inappropriate behaviour by officers, including being spoken to disrespectfully, insulted or physically mistreated.
In response, Hédon has recommended better traceability of police checks and the introduction of a system allowing people to challenge them more easily.
(with AFP)
