Category Archives: France

Parliamentary inquiry condemns veil as ‘un-French’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Islamic full-body veil should be banned from French public offices, hospitals, trains and buses, according to a parliamentary investigation which reported yesterday. In a bad-tempered final session, the committee of inquiry angered many members of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling centre-right party by rejecting their demands for an outright ban on the burka or niqab. After a muddled and heated six-month investigation, the committee decided that such a ban might be declared unconstitutional under French and European law.

Instead, a narrow majority of the 32 members accepted a compromise suggested by Mr Sarkozy and the Prime Minister, François Fillon. They called for a solemn, but unenforceable, parliamentary motion declaring the full-length veil – a marginal but growing phenomenon in France – to be “un-French”. They said that this should be followed soon by a law forbidding people to cover their faces in “official” public spaces, from hospitals to post offices.

The committee’s recommendation split the ruling Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) down the middle. The party’s parliamentary leader, Jean-François Cope, immediately announced that he would push ahead with his own draft law calling for an outright ban. Officially, Socialist MPs boycotted the final meeting of the inquiry, alleging that it had been “polluted” by party politics and hijacked by “faction fighting” within the UMP. Several leading socialist politicians defied the boycott, however, and support an outright ban.

The possibility of a law against the full-length veil was first raised last summer by a Communist MP.

Independent, 16 January 2010

Cf. Raphaël Liogier, “France’s attack on the veil is a huge blunder”, Comment is Free, 26 January 2010

French MPs to denounce Muslim veils, ban later

Posted on by Bob Pitt

France’s parliament is likely to call in a resolution for a ban on Muslim face veils in public but take longer to turn that policy into law, deputies said on Thursday.

A parliamentary commission studying the sensitive issue, which has been discussed alongside a wider public debate about French national identity launched by President Nicolas Sarkozy, is due to publish its recommendations next Tuesday.

Polls say most voters want a legal ban on full-length face veils, known here by the Afghan term burqa although the few worn in France are Middle Eastern niqabs showing the eyes. Critics say a law would stigmatize Muslims and be unenforceable.

Jean-Francois Cope, parliamentary floor leader for Sarkozy’s conservative UMP party, told France Inter radio said the plan was for “a resolution to explain and then a law to decide.” A parliamentary resolution would not be legally binding.

Andre Gerin, head of the commission, agreed that deputies needed more time to draft a law, but told the daily Le Figaro: “The ban on the full facial veil will be absolute.”

Police reports say fewer than 2,000 women in France wear full veils, but deputies such as Gerin – whose constituency in Lyon has many Muslim residents – insist this is a growing trend that Paris must legislate to stop in its tracks.

Gerin said France also had to deal with “the French Taliban who force women to be veiled. By ‘Taliban’ I mean the husband, big brother, family, even the neighborhood, because there is a kind of sharia (Islamic law) in some areas. The full veil is the visible part of this black tide of fundamentalism.”

Reuters, 21 January 2010

UMP spokesperson says veiled women should be denied benefits, banned from public transport

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Frederic LefebvreWomen who wear the burka in France should be banned from using public transport or receiving state handouts, a government spokesman has said.

The call came just one day after the head of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, the UMP, said that Muslim women wearing full face veils should not be granted French nationality. Now UMP party spokesman Frederic Lefebvre has demanded any woman breaking a proposed law making the garment illegal should be “deprived of her rights”.

He said: “When you don’t respect your responsibilities, you should not have access to any benefits. The rights and responsibilities of citizens in France are important. When you ignore rules that make things illegal, like a ban on the burka, you have have some of your rights taken away, like the right to state benefits or using public transport.”

Daily Mail, 19 January 2010

UMP leader wants law banning veiled women from acquiring French nationality

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The head of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party said on Sunday he wants a law to ensure that Muslim women who wear face-covering veils do not acquire French nationality. Xavier Bertrand, head of the conservative UMP party, said the full veil “is simply a prison for women who wear it” and “will make no one believe” a woman wearing it wants to integrate.

Daily Telegraph, 18 January 2010

France moves to outlaw the veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The parliamentary leader of the ruling French party is to put forward a draft law within two weeks to ban the full-body veil from French streets and all other public places.

The announcement by Jean-François Copé, cutting short an anguished six-month debate on the burka and its Arab equivalent, the niqab, will divide both right and left and is likely to anger President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Mr Copé, in an interview with Le Figaro to be published tomorrow, said that he would bring forward a law which would impose fines of up to €750 (£675) on anyone appearing in public “with their face entirely masked”.

Independent, 8 January 2010

See also the Daily Star which reports, under the headline “Women to be fined for wearing Burkas”, that “Strict new laws are being considered in France to tackle Islamic extremism. And campaigners want the same tough penalties in the UK.” Who exactly are these campaigners, you may ask. Well, the Star has found two.

One is right-wing Christian extremist Stephen Green who tells the Star: “We ought to assert our Christian heritage as strongly as France does its secular heritage. There’s no doubt the burka is culturally divisive. Measures like fines would send out a great signal. If we don’t take action against Islam now we are going to see terrible problems in this country in 30 years’ time.”

Bizarrely, the Star informs its readers that “many leading Muslim groups believe the burka should be outlawed in Britain”. But the only example they offer is Diana Nammi of the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation, not hitherto known as a leading Muslim group, who is quoted as saying: “We support bans anywhere in the world.”

Looks like Damian Thompson’s proposal for an alliance between secularists and right-wing Christians on the basis of a common hatred of Islam is already being implemented.

French minister wants to deny citizenship to Muslim women wearing veils

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Eric BessonFrance’s immigration minister said Wednesday that he wants the wearing of Muslim veils that cover the face and body to be grounds for denying citizenship and long-term residence.

Eric Besson said he planned to take “concrete measures” regarding such veils, which are worn by a small minority of women in France but have become the object of a parliamentary inquiry into whether a ban should be imposed. Besson spoke during a hearing before the panel of lawmakers as their nearly six-month inquiry draws to a close.

Besson said he believed a formal ban on veils that cover the face and body seemed to him “unavoidable,” with a ban in public services as a minimum step. Whether such veils are banned or not, he said he intends to personally move forward to ensure that women wearing such veils and seeking French nationality or residence cards are denied.

“I want the wearing of the full veil to be systematically considered as proof of insufficient integration into French society, creating an obstacle to gaining (French) nationality,” he said. He said he would advise prefects, the highest state representative in the various French regions, that the wearing of such veils is a motive for not delivering 10-year residence cards.

Besson said he was prepared to put the measures before parliament to make them law. In November, Besson ordered a nationwide debate on the French identity, to conclude by the end of January with possible measures.

Associated Press, 16 December 2009

Muslims don’t actually want to live in ghettos, shock survey finds

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslims in EuropeMost of Europe’s Muslims want to live in mixed communities, not segregated neighbourhoods, a new report says.

The work by the Open Society Institute (OSI), an independent think-tank, looked at the social integration of Muslims in 11 West European cities. It calls for improved efforts to tackle discrimination.

Europe’s Muslim population is expected to double by 2025 and could reach 40 million. But data on them is very limited, OSI says.

The report says religious discrimination remains a critical barrier to their participation in European society, and the situation has worsened in recent years. The OSI says its aim is to promote tolerance and fairness.

Nazia Hussein, who supervised the work, says many Muslims are still seen as outsiders.

“The majority of Muslims that we’ve spoken to across 11 cities feel very strongly attached to their neighbourhood and city, they feel quite strongly attached to their country,” she told the BBC. “But at the same time they don’t believe that their fellow countrymen or the wider society sees them as either German or French or English.”

The report offers a series of snapshots from: the Netherlands (Amsterdam and Rotterdam), Belgium (Antwerp), Germany (Berlin and Hamburg), Denmark (Copenhagen), the UK (Leicester and London), France (Marseille and Paris) and Sweden (Stockholm).

BBC News, 15 December 2009

French debate on national identity turns into culture war

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Comments by a French junior minister about young Muslims in France have provoked a firestorm of criticism and put the spotlight on a controversial debate on national identity that threatens to spin out of control.

In one of the many local debates scheduled to be held as part of the nationwide discussion on what it means to be French, the junior minister for families, Nadine Morano, suggested Tuesday to a young Muslim that he should change his behaviour. “What I want of a young Muslim is that he loves France when he lives here, finds work and does not speak in slang. And that he doesn’t wear his cap back to front.”

“This brings back the ethnic vision of the nation, the one that took place at (the pro-Nazi puppet government of) Vichy,” opposition Socialist law-maker Arnaud Montebourg said. The president of the NGO Movement Against Racism (MRAP), Mouloud Aounit, told the online edition of the daily 20 Minutes that Morano’s words “are especially dangerous and extremely violent … I think today there is a terrible increase in Islamophobic statements.”

Criticism also came from conservatives who are growing increasingly afraid that the debate on national identity is turning into a clash of cultures between mainstream France and the large French Muslim community, which numbers about 5 million.

Monsters and Critics, 16 December 2009

See also Nabila Ramdani’s post at Comment is Free, 16 December 2009

France to ban full face veil, says ruling party chief

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Jean-Francois CopeFrench President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, the UMP, says it will push for a law banning the full-face Islamic veil, according to its parliamentary leader Jean-François Copé.

“The issue is not how many women wear the burqa,” Copé wrote in an article in the right-wing newspaper Le Figaro. “There are principles at stake: extremists are putting the republic to the test by promoting a practice that they know is contrary to the basic principles of our country.”

RFI, 16 December 2009

‘Vile and racist desecration’ of French mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Castres mosquePolice say assailants have scrawled a Nazi slogan and hung pig feet on a mosque in southern France. Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux has denounced the “vile and racist desecration” of the mosque in the town of Castres.

Police say the swastika in black paint and slogans including Hitler salute “Sieg Heil” in German, “France to the French” in French, and “White Power” in English were scrawled on the mosque.

Hortefeux said Sunday any person found responsible for the overnight desecration should be “severely punished.”

Associated Press, 13 December 2009

See also Le Poireau Rouge, 13 December 2009