Juan Branco - "French society is segregated - but who is at fault ?" - Channel 4

17-year-old Nahel Juan Branco, what do you make of that denial by the French governments that there is a problem of systemic racism in the police Everyone is conscious in France that France is a segregated country in which there is two parallel societies one which lives in the suburbs which is from certain origins from a part of it from northern Africa and Africa and a very conservative and protected white elite that lives in the center of the city of Paris. This is for the main central Parisian situation but you can see a similar configuration in the main cities of France, in Bordeaux, Lyon, Toulouse and so forth. And then of course you have other kinds of social problems in France but this one is a key one and of course police is at the center of this problematic and police is being asked to provide the solutions to this crisis and to this political segregation and there is of course an impossibility to use police in order to create a solution for that.

There has been no political answer in the last 72 hours from the government. Only calls for peace or order depending on which government, which minister would speak. But this shows that there is a clear denial of reality that is extremely problematic.

So do you think this is going to go on and get worse? It's complicated in a frame in which there is no political leader that actually is protecting the interest of this population to actually see a political movement start from here. But what is certain is that the violence will continue today and for the next days because what we're seeing today is a complete decompensation in a sense of part of the society which has decided to not even call politically for anything but just to destroy and produce violence in order to be heard and respected at last.

Now the parallels between this police killing caught on camera and what happened to George Floyd in the United States are inescapable but in that case we saw outrage and anger across the world really, across all sections of society. Is the whole of France outraged by this killing or is it only part of France? Not at all.

And it's a huge problematic in France. You have an important dimension of French society which has been nurtured and nourished in the last years by racist and discriminatory discourse which considers that either this killing was justified or at least that there was some kind of protection that should be attributed to the police. And we're we're finding ourselves in a situation in which I wouldn't speak of civil war phenomenon or even climate but there is a clear again segregation in terms of opinions and I mean that translates in opinions and we see a capacity of empathy towards this 17 years old child which is very limited by part of the population also because violence has been increasing in the last years in France.

There is a huge crisis of the state in France and of its capacity to actually maintain its authority over the whole territory and it has created a lot of suffering and a lot of these discourses which opportunistically take advantage of the situation to put the blame on either immigrants or people from second or third generation. And why are you bringing a civil case when there is a criminal case? Is it because you don't have confidence in that?

To be more precise we're participating I mean there is a provision in the French criminal law which allows us to participate in the criminal case as a party civil as they call it. So both cases will be connected or are joined both the civil and the criminal case but our organization is legally authorized to participate as a victim because we consider that this is a racist crime it is linked and caused by racist either motives directly from the person or either structurally because of the situation because once again most of the victims of police violence are either politically identified in France for example with the Yellow Vest movement either racially discriminated. So we consider that this is the case and the law authorizes us to participate in these proceedings and we will be following and making sure that justice will be served not only for the family of Nael but also for all the people who are suffering from these discriminations.

Juan Branca thank you very much for talking to us.