Against the presumption of self-defence: the petition with over 730,000 signatures shelved
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On the night of 21 to 22 July 2026, the Law Committee of the National Assembly decided, by 35 votes to 21, to shelve the petition “Against the presumption of self-defence for law enforcement”. The text, which had gathered 732,086 signatures, will therefore not be debated in the chamber. The decision came at 12:13 am, as the petition was still climbing towards one million signatures.
The Speaker’s chair in the National Assembly during questions to the government on the “presumption of self-defence”, 21 July 2026.
On the night of 21 to 22 July 2026, the Law Committee of the National Assembly voted, by 35 votes to 21, to shelve the petition “Against the presumption of self-defence for law enforcement”. MPs took the view that the petition did not warrant a debate in the chamber. The petition, filed in late June on the National Assembly’s platform, had gathered 732,086 signatures – far beyond the threshold of 500,000 that, under the Assembly’s rules, opens the possibility of a debate in the chamber.
The Ensemble pour la République, Droite républicaine (LR), Rassemblement national, Les Démocrates (MoDem), and Horizons groups supported shelving the petition. The La France insoumise, Socialistes, Écologiste et social, and Gauche démocrate et républicaine groups, along with the Liot group, voted against shelving it, out of respect for the public mobilisation. The rapporteur, MP Ugo Bernalicis (LFI), argued that the petition was admissible.
Following its shelving, the petition can no longer be signed online. It had been launched on 26 June 2026 by Issam El Khalfaoui, father of Souheil El Khalfaoui, who was shot dead by police at a traffic stop in Marseille in 2021, and co-founder of the SAVE collective (Stop aux violences d’État, “Stop State Violence”). It opposed the bill sponsored by MP Éric Pauget (LR), which provides that police officers and gendarmes “are presumed to have acted” within the law when they use their weapons. This text, likened by its opponents to a “licence to kill”, was adopted by the National Assembly on 7 July 2026 with the votes of the centre, the right, and the far right, and has yet to be examined by the Senate. Should it be definitively adopted, the MPs and associations opposed to the text are considering referring it to the Constitutional Council.
The shelving of the petition came on the same day as the final adoption of the agricultural emergency law (known as the “Duplomb 2 law”). Passed by the National Assembly on the night of 20 to 21 July by 296 votes to 224, then by the Senate, it reintroduces, by way of derogation, two banned pesticides, acetamiprid and flupyradifurone. The petition against the Duplomb law, launched a year earlier, had gathered more than 2.1 million signatures – an all-time record for the platform. Within twenty-four hours, two measures against which huge public campaigns had been mounted were thus, in one case, passed and, in the other, kept out of debate.
In response to the shelving, a coalition of organisations – SAVE, the Comité Adama, Flagrant Déni, the Syndicat de la magistrature, the Syndicat des avocats de France, the Association des avocats pénalistes, and Amnesty International France – is calling for a “major national united march” on 19 September 2026, in Paris and several other cities, to defend “the right to life and the rule of law” and to oppose the “licence to kill”.