Luxembourg's parliament expands police powers to clear public spaces, 42 to 18

The Chamber of Deputies voted on Wednesday to broaden the powers of Luxembourg's police to order people out of public spaces, adopting a reinforced version of the measure known as the Platzverweis by 42 votes to 18.

The law, tabled by Interior Minister Léon Gloden, allows an officer to require a person who is disturbing public order to leave a location and stay away for up to 48 hours within a radius of one kilometre. Where the behaviour is repeated, a municipality can extend that ban to 30 days over a wider perimeter. Police may use force to make someone comply.

What actually changes

An eviction order already existed, but it was narrow. Until now it applied chiefly to people physically blocking the entrances to shops, homes, stations or other buildings. The reinforced text stretches the trigger far beyond that, to conduct that:

• disturbs public tranquillity, health or safety;
• obstructs the free movement of people or traffic;
• or harasses passers-by.

It also strengthens the hand of mayors, who gain the power to impose the longer, wider bans on people deemed to have reoffended. Supporters presented the reform as a pragmatic answer to complaints from residents and shopkeepers about drug scenes and aggressive begging, particularly in the capital's station district. The rapporteur, Laurent Mosar of the governing Christian Social People's Party, argued that officers needed to be able to keep troublemakers away for a meaningful period rather than for a matter of minutes.

A rare chorus of warnings

What set the vote apart was the breadth of the institutional criticism it overrode. The Consultative Commission on Human Rights (CCDH), the Council of State, judicial authorities and the Chamber of Employees had all raised objections during the legislative process — an unusually wide front against a single bill.

The CCDH's central charge was that the law rests on perception rather than proof. It warned that the vague wording invites “arbitrary and discriminatory decisions” by police and mayors, and that people risk being moved on because of how they look or where they are presumed to come from.

A feeling of insecurity, often purely subjective, should not be the driving force behind measures that restrict people's fundamental rights, the human rights commission warned.

The commission also flagged the absence of a clear appeal mechanism against a ban, and cautioned that provisions penalising the obstruction of traffic could chill the right to demonstrate unless protests were explicitly carved out. The Chamber of Employees went further still, warning that an expansive reading could catch legitimate trade-union action, such as a picket, in the same net as public-order offences.

The political divide

The 18 votes against came from the left of the opposition. Dan Biancalana of the Socialist Workers' Party argued that the measure would simply push a visible problem out of sight without addressing its causes — addiction, mental illness and a shortage of social support — leaving the same vulnerable people to reappear a kilometre away, or a month later. Left-wing deputies said the state was reaching for repression where it should be reaching for care.

The government rejected the framing, insisting the police need enforceable tools and that the safeguards written into the text — time limits, geographic limits and the possibility of judicial review — are sufficient. Ministers have repeatedly pointed to residents' fatigue in neighbourhoods where public order has frayed.

With Wednesday's vote, the reinforced Platzverweis clears its principal parliamentary hurdle and moves toward entry into force. Its real test will come on the ground: how officers and mayors interpret elastic phrases such as disturbing “tranquillity,” and whether the courts and the CCDH's warnings translate into limits on how the new powers are used.