‘Accidents happen’: French PM defends police after teenagers injured in protests

PARIS — French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has defended police handling of student protests following incidents that left one schoolboy with a severed hand and another blind in one eye.

“What triggers police action is the occurrence of urban violence,” Lecornu said in parliament Tuesday. “Can accidents happen? The answer is yes,” he added. Lecornu rejected the label “police brutality,” which he said implies that officers had been instructed to use force.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s center-right government is under growing pressure over high school protests across the country. As Lecornu spoke Tuesday, demonstrators from several French unions and teachers’ organizations gathered, along with high school and university students. Representatives of France’s left-wing parties were also present.

Some 86,000 joined marches outside Paris in the morning, according to the interior ministry. The capital’s demonstration was expected to draw a larger crowd in the afternoon.

The protesters demand more funding and better working conditions in high schools. The movement began in working-class Paris suburbs and has since spread nationwide, becoming a political issue as the campaign for next year’s presidential election heats up.

“I hope we can provide a political response to a very real anxiety among high school students,” Lecornu conceded.

On Monday, a 15-year-old boy in northern France had his hand blown apart by a grenade. The local prosecutor said he could not “say for certain whether the student picked up the grenade or whether it was thrown at him.”

In Tours, a 16-year-old lost an eye after being struck by a projectile that the prosecutor said may have been a sub-lethal riot police weapon.

Boris Vallaud, leader of the center-left Socialist group in parliament, said his lawmakers would introduce legislation addressing the use of sub-lethal weapons, which can cause irreversible harm, during high school protests.