French protesters decry racism, other systemic injustices

PARIS (AP) — Hundreds of people in protested Saturday in Paris against racism and police violence and in memory of Black men who died following encounters with French police or under suspicious circumstances.

The protesters marched to the former home of Lamine Dieng, a 25-year-old Franco-Senegalese man arrested in 2007 who died in a police van. Thousands of other protesters marched Saturday in Paris and cities around France in support of undocumented migrants.

“I hope, that this is not just a moment of brief awareness," Dieng's sister Ramata Dieng told The Associated Press. “We have dreamed for a long time of seeing this many people mobilizing on this issue.”

“This can’t stop at indignation. It’s fine to be indignant but we must move to the next step and the next step is to put implement the tools, have laws voted on so that police are no longer above the law,” she said.

The French government agreed earlier this month to pay 145,000 euros ($162,000) to Dieng’s relatives in a settlement via the European Court of Human Rights, after the family tried for more than a decade to hold police accountable for his death.

Many at Saturday’s protest linked it with the case of of George Floyd, an African American man whose death on May 25 in the U.S. city of Minneapolis galvanized protesters around the globe to rally against racism and police brutality.

“George Floyd was the hair that broke the camel’s back in the United States, but it’s not just George Floyd,” demonstrator Lylia Boukerrouche.

“In France, though it’s different, it’s a similar situation. It was a colonial state, and we see that today police violence occurs against Blacks and Arabs, the descendants of immigrants,” Boukerrouche added.

Some demonstrators carried placards bearing...