AI in policing: France

Legal basis

Extended to 31 December 2030 by Article 19 of the loi Ripost, definitively adopted by Parliament on 21 July 2026, for the sole purpose of preventing terrorism and serious threats to personal safety. Biometric identification remains excluded. Real-time facial recognition itself remains prohibited in French public space.

Oversight

Conseil constitutionnel; CNIL (data protection authority)

Piloted at the Paris 2024 Olympics for crowd management and threat detection, flagging anomalies for a trained human operator rather than acting automatically. The legislative history is unusually tangled and worth recording precisely, because the experiment has now been extended twice after being struck down once. The original Olympic-law authorisation was due to expire 31 March 2025. A first extension attempt, attached to transport safety legislation, was censured by the Conseil constitutionnel on 24 April 2025. The experiment was then extended to 31 December 2027 by the JOP 2030 law, upheld by the Conseil constitutionnel in March 2026, with an evaluation report due 30 September 2027. The loi Ripost, definitively adopted 21 July 2026, extended it again to 31 December 2030 and widened its scope from public roads and event perimeters to the interior of buildings open to the public, subject to Interior Ministry authorisation. Ripost also opens a separate and distinct experiment, running to 31 December 2027, permitting algorithmic analysis of surveillance footage in retail premises, supermarkets and shopping centres for the sole purpose of preventing theft. That is framed with its own safeguards: no biometric identification or facial recognition, mandatory human review, a CNIL impact assessment, a register of actions taken on alerts, and a published conformity attestation. Worth noting against the direction of travel: the official evaluation committee found the Olympic pilot's technical performance uneven and its operational value limited. The extensions have proceeded regardless.

Source: French government legislation; Conseil constitutionnel rulings; Amnesty International France and Statewatch reporting · last checked 2026-08-20

Legal basis

No specific statute authorised its use for its first eight years. The interior ministry's own inspection concluded it was used in a judicial, retrospective context rather than real-time administrative surveillance, which affects but does not resolve its legal footing

Oversight

Inter-inspectorate report (IGA, IGPN, IGGN), commissioned by the interior ministry and published October 2024

This is more precise, and more interesting, than a flat operational status conveys, and is worth recording carefully. Investigative outlet Disclose revealed in November 2023 that police and gendarmerie had used BriefCam since 2015 without a clear legal basis, including its facial recognition capability, which is illegal in French public space. The gendarmerie suspended use three days after the report; the national police suspended use in December 2023. The official inter-inspectorate report, finalised February 2024 and published October 2024, examined approximately 600 total uses and found exactly one illegal facial-recognition use. It recommended lifting the suspension and continuing to use BriefCam in investigative services until it can be replaced by a sovereign French-developed system, Systeme V, which has no facial recognition capability and was still described as under development in parliamentary answers as recently as mid-2025. This entry is recorded as operational on the basis that the report recommended resuming use pending that replacement, but the transition to Systeme V should be treated as ongoing rather than complete.

Source: Disclose (original investigation); French Ministry of the Interior inter-inspectorate report · last checked 2026-08-26

Legal basis

Contested. The Code of Criminal Procedure restricts real-time TAJ checks to specially authorised officers during an investigation; independent reporting finds the database used for on-the-spot street identity checks outside that basis.

Oversight

CNIL (French data protection authority); internal Gendarmerie monitoring tool 'Citar' introduced December 2025; no dedicated facial recognition legislation exists

French police and gendarmerie officers carry handheld devices, branded NEO (nouvel equipement operationnel), that run facial recognition software developed by the German company Cognitec, matching photographs taken in the field against the TAJ criminal records database. Facial matching became available on these devices from 2025; a desktop version had existed since 2022. TAJ (Traitement des Antecedents Judiciaires) holds around 17 million records on arrested and accused individuals, 48 million on victims, and roughly 9 million frontal photographs, operated by the Ministry of the Interior. Queries against it rose from 375,000 in 2019 to nearly 1 million by 2024. An investigation by the non-profit outlet Disclose, published in partnership with La Quadrature du Net in March 2026, found the database being used for real-time identity checks on public streets, which the French Code of Criminal Procedure does not permit: TAJ may only be used by specially authorised officers during an investigation, not for on-the-spot verification. Disclose spoke to six individuals in Paris, Marseille and Lyon photographed by police in the preceding four years, in some cases without consent, including one person scanned at a pro-Palestinian protest in Paris. A 2023 report from the police's own internal inspectorate, the IGPN, had already found the database was 'very frequently used on public streets during identity checks'. The Gendarmerie disputes the characterisation. An editorial in its own newspaper, L'Essor de la Gendarmerie, states the tool is limited to criminal investigations, identity checks where a person lacks or refuses identification, and intelligence gathering, describing its purpose as an investigative aid rather than mass surveillance. An internal memo states that results 'must be carefully reviewed by users' and 'must not be considered as evidence'. The Gendarmerie states access is restricted to judicially authorised officers, excluding volunteer deputy gendarmes and reservists. TAJ is monitored by the French data protection authority CNIL, and the Gendarmerie introduced an internal monitoring tool called Citar in December 2025 intended to reduce unauthorised access. La Quadrature du Net, which has previously and unsuccessfully sued over French police use of facial recognition, argues there is no legislation specifying how the technology may be used, by whom, or under what oversight, and that equipping thousands of officers with it amounts to surveillance authorised by the state without a legal framework. This site records a genuine dispute between an internal memo describing careful, restricted use and independent reporting describing frequent use outside the permitted legal basis, rather than resolving it.

Source: Disclose; La Quadrature du Net; Biometric Update; L'Essor de la Gendarmerie · last checked 2026-08-30