The French police have been banned from using drones to survey the public during the coronavirus epidemic. The ban will apply until there is a proper legal basis for their deployment or until they have been adapted so that individuals being filmed cannot be identified, the country’s highest court, the Conseil d’Etat, has decided.
France's Human Rights League announced the news on Monday 18 May saying it was a « real victory ». It took the case to the Conseil after its attempt to have the use banned was rejected by a lower court.
Some twenty drones have been used by the police in Paris over recent weeks under the control of the Prefecture of Police whose head, the Prefect Didier Lallement is a controversial « law and order » disciplinarian drafted in by President Emmanuel Macron early in 2019 to run the police in the capital during the Gilets jaunes protests. He has already had to formally apologise in public for having said early in April that those in hospital resuscitation wards were people who had disobeyed the rules of the lockdown.
