Remarks on the BRAV-M: investigation for "public insult" against Mélenchon

Europe 1 with AFP 23:10 p.m., March 31, 2023

An investigation has been opened for "public insult to a person holding public authority" after Jean-Luc Mélenchon's remarks on the BRAV-M unit reported by police prefect Laurent Nuñez, the Paris prosecutor's office told AFP on Friday, confirming information from Le Parisien. This investigation, opened since Wednesday and entrusted to the Brigade for the repression of delinquency to people, targets the former LFI presidential candidate after remarks Sunday on the Brigade for the repression of motorized violent action, a unit recently implicated in several cases of police violence in the context of demonstrations against the pension reform.

>> READ ALSO - Pensions: for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, "the time has come to move to popular censorship"

Mélenchon wants to dissolve this unity

On LCI, Jean-Luc Mélenchon had said about the members of this unit: "We will send these young people for treatment". "Can you imagine what it's like to say? I volunteer to get on a motorcycle and beat people in passing? It is to manifest a state of mind that does not suit me and that I find abnormal, "had continued the former senator. "For me, this is not a normal activity," he said.

"There are all kinds of violence for which there has been care, hearings, we are thinking," he added. The former candidate Insoumise repeated the wish of his troops to "dissolve" this unit, a proposal that is also currently supported by a petition. The Paris prosecutor's office confirmed that its investigation also targeted lawyer Arié Alimi, who is the subject of a separate report from the police prefect.

On RMC, on March 22, he said that the BRAV-M "are a certain type of volunteer police officers, who seek violence, that's how they are selected, who are thrown into the streets of Paris with batons and weapons, who break bones and who do manhunts as we see on the images all day long at the moment." This lawyer regularly defends victims of police violence, such as the family of Cédric Chouviat, a delivery man who died in Paris following an arrest in early 2020.

>> READ ALSO - What is the Brav-M, the police unit singled out during demonstrations?

Nunez rejects the dissolution of the BRAV-M

On Tuesday, Laurent Nuñez had rejected any dissolution of the BRAV-M and castigated the "staggering (...) comparisons made with the Voltigeurs", these motorcycle units implicated in the death of Malik Ousekine in 1986. Attacking the "remarks against its officials, which are insulting and some of which fall under criminal and judicial qualification", he warned that "henceforth, regardless of the person who makes these remarks, a politician, a lawyer", he would "systematically seize the justice of these insults".