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Protests in France over health passport – but 3 million vaccine appointments booked since Macron’s announcement

Several protests took place around France on Wednesday over plans to make vaccinations compulsory for healthworkers and expand the health passport scheme to include entry to venues including cafés, bars and shopping centres.

Protests in France over health passport - but 3 million vaccine appointments booked since Macron's announcement
A protestor in Paris. Photo: Geoffroy van der Hasselt/AFP

Around 19,000 people took part in 53 different protests around France – but in the three days since president Emmanuel Macron’s announcement of the new measures 3.2 million people have booked vaccine appointments.

Some of the protests began on Wednesday morning in Paris as the annual military parade for the traditional Bastille Day parade was taking place along the famous Champs-Elysées and police fired tear gas to disperse some protesters.

The demonstrators were unhappy at the decision announced on Monday to oblige health workers to get vaccinated and bring in a vaccine health pass for most public places.

Unvaccinated people would require, for example, a negative test result or proof of recent recovery from Covid in order to enter restaurants.

READ ALSO How France’s expanded health passport will work 

Demonstrators in Paris. Photo by GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT / AFP

“This is in the name of freedom” was the message from some of the protesters.

In one area of the French capital police fired teargas to disperse the crowd.

The declared protest route had not been respected, Paris police said in a tweet, deploring the “throwing of projectiles” and lighting of fires by the protesters.

Throughout Paris some 2,250 people protested, while other demonstrations took place in Toulouse, Bordeaux, Montpelier, Nantes and elsewhere. The French authorities put the total number of protesters at 19,000.

Photo by GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT / AFP

The interior ministry said that there were altogether 53 different protests throughout France.

“Down with dictatorship”, “down with the health pass” protesters chanted.

One of them, Yann Fontaine, a 29-year-old notary’s clerk from the Berry region in central France, said he had come to demonstrate in Paris arguing that the imposition of a health pass equalled “segregation”.

“Macron plays on fears, it’s revolting. I know people who will now get vaccinated just so that they can take their children to the movies, not to protect others from serious forms of Covid,” he said.

The French government on Tuesday defended its decision to impose Covid tests for unvaccinated people who want to eat in restaurants or take long-distance trips, as the country looks to avoid a surge in more contagious Delta cases.

“There isn’t any vaccine obligation, this is maximum inducement,” government spokesman Gabriel Attal said.

“I have a hard time understanding, in a country where 11 vaccines are already mandatory… that this could be seen as a dictatorship,” he said, adding that after a year of studying the vaccines “the time of doubting is long past”.

Since Macron’s announcement on Monday evening, 3.2 million people have booked vaccine appointments on online booking platforms, including 430,000 on Wednesday, which was a public holiday.

OPINION: Macron is now coercing the French into getting vaccinated – and it seems that they like it

The rules will be relaxed for teenagers who have only been able to get the jabs since mid-June. “Making summer hell is out of the question,” Attal said.

According to an Elabe opinion poll published Tuesday, the new safety measures have a large majority of approval amongst French people.

Around 35.5 million people – just over half of France’s population – have received at least one vaccine dose so far.

At the start of the pandemic, France had some of the highest levels of vaccine scepticism in the developed world.

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POLITICS

French parliament backs bill against hair discrimination affecting black women

France's lower house of parliament on Thursday approved a bill forbidding workplace discrimination based on hair texture, which the draft law's backers say targets mostly black women wearing their hair naturally.

French parliament backs bill against hair discrimination affecting black women

Olivier Serva, an independent National Assembly deputy for the French overseas territory of Guadeloupe and the bill’s sponsor, said it would penalise any workplace discrimination based on “hair style, colour, length or texture”.

Similar laws exist in around 20 US states which have identified hair discrimination as an expression of racism.

In Britain, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has issued guidelines against hair discrimination in schools.

Serva, who is black, said women “of African descent” were often encouraged before job interviews to change their style of hair. Backers also say that men who wear their hair in styles like dreadlocks are also affected.

The bill was approved in the lower house National Assembly with 44 votes in favour and two against. It will now head to the upper Senate where the right has the majority and the vote’s outcome is much less certain.

‘Target of discrimination’

Serva, who also included discrimination suffered by blondes and redheads in his proposal, points to an American study stating that a quarter of black women polled said they had been ruled out for jobs because of how they wore their hair at the job interview.

Such statistics are hard to come by in France, which bans the compilation of personal data that mention a person’s race or ethnic background on the basis of the French Republic’s “universalist” principles.

The draft law does not, in fact, contain the term “racism”, noted Daphne Bedinade, a social anthropologist, saying the omission was problematic.

“To make this only about hair discrimination is to mask the problems of people whose hair makes them a target of discrimination, mostly black women,” she told Le Monde daily.

A black Air France air crew member in 2022 won a 10-year legal battle for the right to work with braided hair on flights after a decision by France’s highest appeals court.

While statistics are difficult to come by, high-profile people have faced online harassment because of their hairstyle.

In the political sphere they include former government spokeswoman Sibeth Ndiaye, and Audrey Pulvar, a deputy mayor of Paris, whose afro look has attracted much negative comment online.

The bill’s critics say it is unnecessary, as discrimination based on looks is already banned by law.

“There is no legal void here,” said Eric Rocheblave, a lawyer specialising in labour law.

Calling any future law “symbolic”, Rocheblave said it would not be of much practical help when it came to proving discrimination in court.

Kenza Bel Kenadil, an influencer and self-proclaimed “activist against hair discrimination”, said a law would still send an important message.

“It would tell everybody that the law protects you in every way and lets you style your hair any way you want,” she said.

The influencer, who has 256,000 followers on Instagram, said she herself had been “forced” to tie her hair in a bun when she was working as a receptionist.

Her employers were “very clear”, she said. “It was, either you go home and fix your hair or you don’t come here to work”.

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