Read on Twitter
In december 2018 my younger brother was a victim of a violent police repression at a demonstration in France. He was beaten up and arrested. He noticed he wasn't breathing properly, asked to see a doctor.
The doctor was brought to see him hours later and told the police that my brother needed to be brought to a hospital asap. They waited another hour to take him there. When he got there, he was immediately taken into an OR for an emergency surgery. His lung was letting out air
into his chest. It could have become life threatening. Recovery took months. Police filed a complaint against my brother, saying he had been violently assaulting officers. My brother risked prison. But hundreds of people were filming that day.
We shared calls on social media for people with footage of my brother's arrest to share their footage with us. Someone did. They had filmed the entire scene from their balcony. On the day of my brother's first hearing, all his lawyer had to do was show this video.
The footage prooved my brother's version to be real and the police officer's version to be entirely made up. All charges were dropped on the spot. I am sharing this today because without that video, my brother might be in prison today. And the french government is passing a law
to prevent footage of police activity to be shared on the web, restricting journalists and citizens's freedom of information. My brother's story is why any restriction of that sort puts democracy at a high risk. It is bad enough to live in countried where you risk a limb,
your eyes and your life when protesting, which France is. If these events can't be filmed, if police can't be filmed, no justice is possible. That's just it.
