Support for Siu Lan Ko and Police Custody

Support for Siu Lan Ko

The socialist Mayor of Paris has offered the artist Siu Lan Ko, whose work was censored earlier this week, exhibition space at the prestigious CENTQUATRE (104) centre. She hasn’t yet accepted but her lawyer has said that the Director of l’école des Beauxarts de Paris has ignored her client’s request for a meeting and that she would now consider court action.

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The number of garde à vue, people detained by the police for questioning, has increased in France by 35%. Has there been a crime wave? Not according to the government but the conditions in which suspects are held have been described as “degrading and inhuman” by the Inspector of Prisons and this week after visiting the cells at Charleville-Mézières the Judge was shocked.
Appearing before him was a man who pleaded guity to driving under the influence but who was also accused of physically and verbally assulting a police officer.
You must understand that police custody in France is designed to break the spirit of the detainees. Prisoners are detained together in cells which are often no bigger than 2 square meters and fitted with a bench only 25 cm wide, not wide enough to sleep on. Although, in theory, there is a right to be assisted by a lawyer there are not nearly enough lawyers, and where there are lawyers they only have access to the charges and evidence after 48 Hours.
This man was held in a cell of 2.3 sq meters with 2 other people. The Judge described the cell as “repulsively filthy, the walls smeared with blood and excrement”. After a number of hours in the cell the man contested the conditions of his detention and was put in another cell with an overflowing lavatory in the centre of the floor.
The Judge found the man guilty but imposed no sentence declaring that the man had already been subjected to a traumatising experience and that he had paid dearly for a very minor offence. In his summing up the Judge said that if people are kept in crowded cells which are repulsively filthy without a minimum of personal hygiene he could only conclude that it constituted “a degrading and inhuman experience.”