Tens of thousands of people took to the streets across France on Sunday in protest against a proposed law that critics say would grant police a "licence to kill." Around a hundred demonstrations were held nationwide — including in Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Marseille and Lille — as opponents of the bill urged the French Senate to reject it. Police estimates put the Lyon turnout at 4,500 and Toulouse at 3,700, while the Paris march drew several thousand, among them left-wing politicians, magistrates' union representatives, and members of human rights organisations.

The bill, passed by the National Assembly — France's lower house of parliament — in July, establishes a presumption that law enforcement officers who use their weapons have acted lawfully. Supporters argue the measure is needed to ensure that police and gendarmes are not automatically treated as suspects when they deploy armed force. But opponents, including Amnesty International, France's League of Human Rights, and the magistrates' union, say the legislation effectively reverses the burden of proof — shifting the obligation to demonstrate wrongdoing from the state onto the victims or their families. "It will no longer be for the police, no longer for the state, to prove it had the right to shoot," said lawyer Raphaël Kempf at the Paris demonstration. "It will fall to the families of young people from working-class neighbourhoods who have been killed by police."

Among those marching in Paris was Amal Bentousi, whose brother Amine was shot in the back by police during a robbery in Seine-Saint-Denis — a department just north of Paris — in 2012. She described the bill as a measure designed to "reverse the burden of proof" and called it a "licence to execute." Hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) MP Mathilde Panot addressed the crowd, declaring: "In the Republic there can be no organised police impunity." A petition against the bill gathered 730,000 signatures on the National Assembly's website, though a parliamentary committee dismissed it in July.

The protests came against a backdrop of recent high-profile cases of alleged police violence. A judicial investigation was opened this week into an officer who forcibly restrained a man in the southern city of Carcassonne in late June; the man subsequently died. At Saturday's demonstration in Marseille, Cédric Picard of Amnesty International warned that "police abuse is among the worst" in France and that the law risked worsening an already serious situation. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez had called on security services to remain "particularly vigilant" during the weekend's events. In Rennes, a Breton city in northwestern France, protests turned violent: eight people were arrested and three officers injured after demonstrators threw projectiles at police. The bill now awaits a vote in the Senate.