Paris, France – Issam El Khalfaoui’s teenage son Souhail was shot and killed by a police officer in 2021 in Marseille. The police and the justice system took different actions to cover up the evidence. We realised that this was a deeply systemic issue,” El Khalfaoui told Al Jazeera.
The witnesses were not interviewed, and the case file completely disappeared from the court. That is the reality.” France has one of the highest numbers of fatal police shootings in Western Europe. At least 69 people were killed by police or gendarmerie officers in 2024, compared with 49 in 2023 and 50 in 2022.
Now, French police are again facing scrutiny, this time over their tactics during clashes in education protests. A 15-year-old lost a hand from a police stun grenade, and another officer threw a tear gas canister at close range, shattering a 14-year-old’s jaw and several teeth. The use of stun grenades has since been halted.
Authorities say 700 police have also been injured. The unrest comes as a controversial bill that would presume police officers acted in self-defence when using firearms faces a vote in the Senate. Khalfaoui launched a petition against the draft law that received more than 700,000 signatures.
The measure, which critics describe as a “licence to kill”, was approved by the National Assembly in July. Several advocacy groups, including Stop State Violence (SAVE), the Human Rights League (LDH) and Amnesty International, as well as left-wing lawmakers, organised protests in Paris, Marseille, Lyon and Toulouse, which drew nearly 50,000 people on September 20. Under the proposed law, police officers and gendarmes would be presumed to have acted in self-defence if they used weapons in the line of duty, placing the burden of proof on the complainant.
For El Khalfaoui, who co-founded SAVE after his 19-year-old son’s death, passing the law would only increase the police’s strength. Bruno Bartocetti, a regional representative for the police union, told French news channel BFMTV the El Khalfaoui case was an act of “self-defence beyond any doubt” and said Souhail wanted to “start a fight”. The judicial case was closed in December 2021, but reopened when the family’s attorney filed a complaint for “obstruction of the discovery of truth” after surveillance camera videos disappeared.
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