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Summary

The Ligue des droits de l’Homme guide to protester rights in France — the rules on declarations, ID checks, searches, and garde à vue, written by France’s leading civil-liberties NGO.

Body

The LDH (Ligue des droits de l’Homme, France’s leading human-rights NGO, founded 1898, affiliated with the International Federation for Human Rights) publishes Manifester : de la rue à la garde à vue, nos droits as the canonical French civil-liberties KYR guide for protesters [source: ldh-guide-du-manifestant]. The guide is jurisdiction-tagged French law, written for the general public, and explicitly non-partisan (the LDH defends the right to demonstrate; it does not endorse any specific cause) [source: ldh-guide-du-manifestant].

Operational coverage: the rules on declarations (the French déclaration de manifestation regime — when a protest must be declared in advance, what form the declaration takes, and what happens if you do not); ID checks (contrôle d’identité — when police may ask for ID, what they may and may not do if you refuse, the specific case of protest-related ID checks); searches (fouille — when a police officer may search a person, a vehicle, or personal effects; the difference between a palpation de sécurité and a full search); garde à vue (the formal custody regime — duration, rights to counsel, rights to a doctor, rights to have a person informed, the right to silence) [source: ldh-guide-du-manifestant]. The guide also covers post-arrest options: comparator of release options, the role of the parquet, and the LDH’s own support line.

The guide is the natural partner of Le guide du manifestant arrêté — the LDH guide is more readable for the public; the GISTI guide is more operationally dense. Both should be available at any action’s staging area [source: ldh-guide-du-manifestant]. Free PDF; license not explicit — treat as link-only. Not legal advice; French jurisdiction only.

Use it for

Distribution at FR actions; pre-action briefing; coordination with the LDH’s regional support lines.

Related

• boycotts-and-strikes
• buergerbegehren
• citizen-lobbying
• dilemma-actions
• escalation
• incidencia-politica
• methods-of-nonviolent-action
• noncooperation
• nonviolent-direct-action
• pillars-of-support
• structure-tests
• the-campaign-cycle
• the-tactic-star

Open Questions

• Confirm current edition date; the French protest-law regime changed under the 2019–2020 Loi anticasseurs and the 2023 Loi du 19 juillet 2023.
• Cross-link the LDH’s regional sections for local legal-support lines.