French police have detained more than 5,000 people amid protests by high school and university students that have spread across the country, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said, according to the French television channel TF1, cited by Report.
“More than 5,000 people have been detained since Monday,” the broadcaster quoted the interior minister as saying.
The minister said that law enforcement officers detained 1,747 people during Friday’s protests, slightly fewer than the previous day, when 1,954 people were detained.
According to him, demonstrations were held outside 735 educational institutions on October 2, with 158 of them sustaining damage.
The wave of high school student protests began last week in the Île-de-France region and has since spread nationwide. Students are protesting excessive academic workloads, staff shortages and other systemic problems in the education sector. In some areas, peaceful demonstrations have escalated into mass unrest and clashes with law enforcement. Amid the protests, National Education Minister Édouard Geffray announced that a number of educational institutions would switch to remote learning.