Mahmoud was an airport worker with no criminal record and vetted clearance from the ministry of the interior to access runways when, without warning, he was placed under a preventive three-month house arrest order ahead of the Paris Olympics last summer.
He immediately lost his clearance and the job he had held for 11 years.
“It’s surreal. I feel stunned, I can’t understand what’s happening to me,” Mahmoud told an investigation by outlet Mediapart, which reported he was at a loss to explain why authorities would identify him as someone who could potentially disrupt the Olympics.
“They’re destroying my life. I’m going to lose everything.”
RM Block
Imposed without trial, the order to stay within a confined area and report daily to a police station was a use of a police power that had been introduced as an emergency measure following the Bataclan attacks 10 years ago and subsequently made a permanent part of French law.
So-called Micas were used 547 times during the Olympic period, according to a parliamentary security report, and home searches 626 times.
Among the material used to justify Micas were social media posts, the conviction of a sibling, and in Mahmoud’s case, a dismissed allegation by a neighbour that he once used anti-Semitic insults.
It’s an example of how France hardened in response to the attacks, a traumatic shock to the country that struck at the fabric of everyday life, and which rights groups warn has eroded long-held commitments to individual freedoms.
“For me, that’s the turning point. I could even call it a legal revolution in counter-terrorism after 2015,” lawyer Lucie Simon told French radio in a programme marking the 10-year anniversary.
“A state of shock that affected almost all French people after the 2015 attacks ... prevented any real legal reflection on the quality of evidence and the disproportionate consequences of these measures.”
The gunmen massacred soft targets on Friday, November 13th, 2015. They killed dozens of people in a shooting spree along the terraced restaurants of bohemian northeast Paris, before trapping and killing scores of people attending a rock concert at the nearby Bataclan theatre.
Three of the attackers failed to gain entry to the France-Germany game at the Stade de France and blew themselves up outside.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, framing it as a response to French efforts to try to oust them from the large parts of Iraq and Syria they then controlled.
Assailants remained at large when the French government declared a state of emergency in the hours afterwards.
Police could place anyone they had “serious grounds” to suspect could be a threat to public safety or order under house arrest without trial. They could also search their premises.
The government could ban protests – climate activists found themselves under house arrest on the eve of the landmark 2015 Paris UN climate summit – dissolve charitable organisations deemed to be undermining public order, and block websites thought to be promoting or inciting terrorism.
The state of emergency was extended six times over two years. Before it finally expired, the government of president Emmanuel Macron introduced a law to make some of the emergency powers permanent.
[ Frank McNally on revisiting the Charlie Hebdo massacre 10 years onOpens in new window ]
Figures suggest the new powers were used broadly. Of the 11,000 people arrested during France’s Yellow Vest protests from 2018 to 2019, just 3,000 were convicted, according to Amnesty International.
The state’s strengthened powers to be able to dissolve organisations and make public funding conditional on not disturbing the public order have alarmed non-profit groups.
The Human Rights League (LDH), France’s oldest human rights organisation, recently reported that three environmental organisations including the Bird Protection League were stripped of public funding after writing letters objecting to the building of a river port.
Government ministers have at times made threatening suggestions about the funding of LDH itself.
In the wake of the Olympics, a group of United Nations experts criticised France for using security powers in an “indiscriminate or overbroad manner” that in some cases “appeared to be aimed at preventing disruptive public protests rather than terrorism”.
The UN experts found “patterns of discriminatory policing, targeting individuals or groups for political views, religious affiliation or ethnic background”.
A review of Micas used during the Olympics by Reuters found several cases in which the interior ministry “appeared to conflate practices such as praying or enlisting children in a private Muslim school with threatening behaviour”.
Salah Abdeslam, the only attacker who lived to face trial, told a courtroom in 2021 that his cell “wanted France to go through the same pain” as those who had been killed in French air strikes in Syria.
His was an “authentic Islam”, he told the court. He was sentenced to life in prison.
Like many European-born jihadists, Abdeslam and his fellow attackers were not particularly religiously observant.
Abdeslam was a petty criminal who had done time for theft and had been fined for cannabis possession; others were heavy drinkers who liked clubbing.
Years after the attack, the debate continues about whether it is appropriate to see terrorist actions as motivated by religious belief, or more complex social factors.
“Excessive measures are not necessary for security,” the UN experts warned France last year, “and can counterproductively fuel grievance narratives that lead to radicalisation.”
[ Bataclan verdicts: ‘This trial has been a lesson in humanity’Opens in new window ]
