In the wake of last month’s terror attacks, French people of ‘Muslim appearance’ complain of being arbitrarily stopped by police

The strained relationship between French police and the country’s non-white population is under fresh scrutiny in the wake of last month’s terrorist attacks as a Paris appeals court considers a landmark case brought by black and Arab men who say they were openly stopped by officers for no other reason than their skin colour.

Racial profiling – in which French people of black and north African origin are routinely pulled over on the street and asked to show their identity papers with no explanation – has long been a fraught issue in France, contributing to tension and urban rioting on housing estates.

But the current political context, in which France is soul-searching over race relations, discrimination, antisemitism and hate speech in the wake of January’s terrorist attacks, has thrown the spotlight on equality issues more than ever before. Campaign groups say that since the attacks, which began with a deadly assault on the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and ended in a bloody siege at a kosher supermarket, French people of “Muslim appearance” – black and Arab – are complaining of an increase in incidences of arbitrarily being pulled over by police.

A Paris appeals court will on Wednesday consider a longstanding civil test case brought by 13 French men of black or north African origin aged 18 to 35, with professions ranging from student to teacher, local councillor to professional sportsman, who all say they were stopped by police in various cities across France because of their race. The case is supported by the advocacy group, Open Society Justice Initiative, whose research in 2009 found a black person was six times more likely to be stopped by police than a white person in Paris, and an Arab person was almost eight times more likely to be stopped than a white person.

In 2013, a French court ruled that the men had been unable to prove racial motives for the identity checks. But their lawyers and campaign groups said they would pursue the case through all French appeals courts and then to the European Court of Human Rights. It is the first time the French state has been accused of racial discrimination in court over its police checks.

Pressure increased this month after Jacques Toubon, the French constitutional ombudsman appointed to defend citizens’ rights, appealed to the government “to take concrete measures to prevent and crack down on abusive identity checks”.

François Hollande, before his election as president in 2012, acknowledged that racial profiling in police checks was a problem and made a campaign promise to introduce a form of written receipt for all checks, but so far there has been no reform.

Sihame Assbague, spokeswoman of the group Stop le Contrôle au Faciès which campaigns against police racial profiling, said: “Even before the current climate, this was a very important case – the first time citizens sued the French state for racial profiling in police checks ... But now there are even more injurious situations and conflations being made. The fight against terrorism seems to justify a push that is seeing more discrimination.

“Under cover of the fight against terrorism, there seems to be even more reason to stop and check ‘people of Muslim appearance’, in other words black or Arab people. It is very worrying to us.”

Hollande has tried to cling to a spirit of “national unity” after the January attacks, whose victims included two French police officers of ethnic origin: one a black female officer, the other a man of Algerian descent, and Muslim. As France comes to terms with the problem of homegrown terrorism, the government has vowed to address social divisions and segregation, including what the prime minister Manuel Valls called France’s “territorial, social and ethnic apartheid”.

This week Hollande vowed tougher penalties for “racist, antisemitic or homophobic” remarks in the wake of last month’s attacks.