March against the “licence to kill”: a hundred towns and cities mobilised before the Senate examines the bill
Published on
Nearly 50,000 people marched on 19 and 20 September in around a hundred towns and cities across France against the bill establishing a presumption of self-defence for law enforcement. Passed by the National Assembly on 7 July, the text is due to be examined by the Senate this autumn.
On Sunday 20 September, 48,750 people demonstrated against the bill establishing a presumption of self-defence for law enforcement, according to the Interior Ministry’s count. The Paris police prefecture recorded 21,000 demonstrators in the capital, between the place de la République and the place de la Nation. Prefectures counted 4,500 people in Marseille, the same number in Lyon and 3,700 in Toulouse. Marches had already taken place the day before, notably in Strasbourg and Rennes. The mobilisation was a broad one: around a hundred towns and cities were affected, in mainland France as well as in the overseas territories.
The call to march had been issued by the collective Stop aux violences d’État (SAVE, “Stop State Violence”) and the Comité Adama, joined by the Ligue des droits de l’Homme, Amnesty International France, the Syndicat de la magistrature and the Syndicat des avocats de France. Politis counts 161 signatory organisations, among them several left-wing political parties. Samia El Khalfaoui, co-founder of SAVE and aunt of Souheil El Khalfaoui, who was killed by a police officer in Marseille in 2021, told Politis she wanted to take the issue beyond the circle of victims’ families and survivors.
A bill that shifts the burden of proof
The bill was passed at first reading in the National Assembly on 7 July 2026, by 313 votes to 199 according to LCP, with the votes of the governing bloc and those of the Rassemblement national. The Senate is due to examine it this autumn. If it adopts the text unchanged, the bill will be definitively passed; if it amends the text, the bill will return to the National Assembly for a second reading, with the possibility of a joint committee. A referral to the Constitutional Council would remain open before promulgation.
The text adds to article L. 435-1 of the internal security code, which has governed the use of weapons by police officers and gendarmes since 2017: when an officer uses their weapon, they would be presumed to have acted under conditions of absolute necessity and strict proportionality, a presumption that could be rebutted at any time by any evidence to the contrary. In an opinion submitted to Parliament on 26 June 2026, the Defender of Rights Claire Hédon considered that such a presumption is liable to undermine the guarantees attached to the right to life, to access to a judge and to the establishment of the truth.
The mobilisation of 20 September grew out of a parliamentary deadlock. Filed against the text on the National Assembly’s platform, a petition passed 732,000 signatures before being shelved by the law committee, by 35 votes to 21, without the floor debate it could have opened ever taking place. It is that refusal which the march’s organisers point to as the immediate reason for taking to the streets.
What it changes for establishing the facts
Demonstrating that a police shooting was neither absolutely necessary nor strictly proportionate requires reconstructing precise material evidence: the position and movement of the vehicle, the angle and trajectory of the shot, the distances, the chronology down to the second. These elements are rarely legible from police reports alone.
If the lawfulness of the shot becomes the starting point of judicial examination, it will fall to families and their lawyers to produce that demonstration — in cases where the resources for expert analysis available to them are already in no way comparable to those of the institution under scrutiny. The coalition of organisations that signed the call to march points out that at least thirty-five occupants of vehicles have been killed by police gunfire during a refus d’obtempérer (a refusal to stop for the police) since article L. 435-1 came into force, without any public review ever having been carried out. In a report published in July 2026, the Court of Auditors called on the contrary for greater transparency on the use of force.
The organisations behind the mobilisation say the Senate will take up the text in October and are calling, until then, for senators to be lobbied to reject it.