Far from Arizona, the rights a government may owe to immigrants even as they resist the state’s authority are being debated in France, after the release of video showing French riot police dragging African mothers away from a protest on the outskirts of Paris last month.
The video was shot July 21 during a demonstration led by homeless women, originally from the Ivory Coast, who had set up a temporary encampment near an apartment building they had been squatting in that was scheduled for demolition.
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At least one pregnant woman faints, while a little boy is in hysterics as he is dragged along the ground under his mother. An activist from the Right to a Home, a French advocacy group supporting the women’s demand for alternative housing from the state, shot the video on a camera that was broken by the police as he was ejected from the scene. After the footage was recovered from the camera, the video was posted online last week where it has been viewed more than 500,000 times.
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Last Friday, as a he declared a “war” on crime during a speech in Grenoble, French President Nicolas Sarkozy made an explicit connection between criminality and immigration. RFI reported:
“We are suffering the consequences of 50 years of insufficiently regulated immigration which has led to a failure of integration,” he said. “Nationality should be stripped from anyone of foreign origin who deliberately endangers the life of a police officer, a soldier or a gendarme or anyone else holding public authority.”
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/video-shows-rough-treatment-of-immigrant-mothers-by-french-police/?hp
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