Leader of the Socialists in France welcomes high school and student protests

The General Secretary of the French Socialist Party and presidential candidate Olivier Faure today welcomed the “rising generation” during the high school student protests and called for an “immediate halt to the use of rubber ball grenades, rubber bullet launchers” and other means against students.

During the high school protests in Paris, where students are demanding more resources and teaching staff, Faure emphasized that a “generation is rising up, towards whom the authorities have so far shown contempt, responding solely with force and police violence,” local media reported.

“They represent our future. When the future knocks on your door, you don’t greet it with a baton,” said Faure, adding that it is necessary for “adults to gather in large numbers” to protect the protesting children and ensure their demands are heard.”

Faure called for an “immediate halt to the use of rubber ball grenades, rubber bullet launchers (LBD), and tasers currently being used against children.”

The president of the Socialist parliamentary group in the lower house, Boris Vallaud, said this morning on RMC radio that his parliamentary group would submit a bill to ensure that, during protests involving minors, law enforcement can no longer use weapons that can cause mutilation or resort to the “brutal practice of neck restraints.”

While the high school protest movement, marked by widespread violence, shows no signs of abating, several young people have been injured in police interventions.

One case stands out in particular: a fifteen-year-old student whose hand was blown off by a police grenade in Lens. The General Inspectorate of the National Police has launched ten investigations since the movement began in mid-September.

Alongside this parliamentary initiative, a petition has also been launched on the lower house’s website against the “completely disproportionate response of the security forces towards demonstrators.”

The petition has already been signed by 3,000 people who are demanding a ban on restraint techniques that carry a risk of suffocation—holding a person face down on the ground with pressure on the chest, holds that block breathing or blood flow (so-called chokeholds or neck restraints), and the folding technique (pressing the torso toward the knees).

They are also demanding the withdrawal of weapons that cause severe injuries—such as LBD 40 launchers, explosive and shock grenades with pellets, as well as taser weapons.