Three former high school students are suing the French state for racial discrimination saying they were stopped and searched by police on a school trip because of their skin colour, reports The Guardian.
The high-profile court case, which opens in Paris on Monday, is the latest legal battle in France over men of black and north African heritage being routinely pulled over on the street and asked to show their identity papers with no explanation.
Lawyers for the high school students argue that the French police continue to use racial profiling to arbitrarily stop non-white people, despite a landmark court ruling in 2016 when the French state was found guilty of carrying out unjustified identity checks on men from black and minority ethnic backgrounds.
The final-year high school students of Malian, Comorian and Moroccan heritage were with their teacher and class on the way back from a two-day school trip to Brussels in March 2017 where they had been learning about democracy and the European Union. Their train from Brussels had just arrived at Paris’s Gare du Nord station at around 8pm and the boys, aged between 18 and 19, were getting off with their bags when they were singled out and stopped by police.
First, one of the pupils was stopped on the platform, then the other two were stopped in front of their class and made to open their bags, without explanation.