France Could Strip Foreign-Born Criminals of Citizenship

Criminal offenders who recently obtained citizenship may have it stripped from them after a recent bill was passed.
France Could Strip Foreign-Born Criminals of Citizenship
MAYBE FRENCH NO MORE: Lawyer Franck Boezec (R), with his client Lies Hebbadj (L), at a press conference in Nantes, France, on April 26. (Jean-Sebastien Evrard/Getty Images )
8/3/2010
Updated:
10/1/2015
<a><img src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/09/FRANCE-98675624-WEB.jpg" alt="MAYBE FRENCH NO MORE: Lawyer Franck Boezec (R), with his client Lies Hebbadj (L), at a press conference in Nantes, France, on April 26. (Jean-Sebastien Evrard/Getty Images )" title="MAYBE FRENCH NO MORE: Lawyer Franck Boezec (R), with his client Lies Hebbadj (L), at a press conference in Nantes, France, on April 26. (Jean-Sebastien Evrard/Getty Images )" width="320" class="size-medium wp-image-1816632"/></a>
MAYBE FRENCH NO MORE: Lawyer Franck Boezec (R), with his client Lies Hebbadj (L), at a press conference in Nantes, France, on April 26. (Jean-Sebastien Evrard/Getty Images )
PARIS—The French Parliament will discuss in September a bill that would allow the government to strip French citizenship from criminal offenders who recently obtained it.

On Europe 1 radio, Immigration Minister Eric Besson explained how he planned to implement the decision taken by President Nicolas Sarkozy, who made the announcement in the city of Grenoble on July 30. Besson said that an offender who became French less than 10 years before his sentencing and condemned to more than five years in prison would automatically lose his French citizenship.

The French government, which took power in 2007 after campaigning for better public security, appears ready for hard measures: In June this year, Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux declared he would do everything in his power to strip the citizenship of Lies Hebbadj, an Algerian-born French butcher of Muslim faith, because of his polygamy and accusations of child benefit fraud.

Similarly, President Sarkozy reacted to violent riots in the suburbs of Grenoble where gangs used assault rifles in clashes with police. The riots started when a North African gang member who had just robbed a local casino opened fire on police officers and was shot dead. In the wake of the incident, several police officers and their families needed to be placed under special protection after the gangs issued “contracts” offering rewards for their deaths.

This led President Sarkozy to declare on July 30 in Grenoble that the right to be French was a right that had to be deserved, and that criminals attempting to kill a representative of public order should not be entitled to keep such a right.

The socialist opposition called the move “infamous” and questioned the legal conformity of the bill. Today, only attacks to national security, such as spying and terrorism, can justify the stripping of a French citizen’s nationality.

Elisabeth Guigou, Socialist Party representative and former justice minister, said to the 20 Minutes newspaper, “To ostracize foreigners living in our country or French citizen of foreign origin is infamous and miserable.”

“One cannot mix criminality and ethnic origin and let people think that a foreigner is necessarily an offender. Nicolas Sarkozy’s bill on citizenship is in contradiction with the republican spirit and, in my view, in contradiction with the first article of the constitution.”

According to Dominique Rousseau, a constitutional law professor at Montpellier-I University, as quoted by Le Point newspaper, things are indeed clear.

“The constitution is sometimes said to be vague, but in this case things are crystal clear: the only way to have Nicolas Sarkozy’s statement become legal would be to negate the principle that says that all French citizens are equal to the law, no matter their origin, and that would mean to delete or modify Article 1 of the constitution.”

But for Besson, the law is not unconstitutional.

“We are only going back to the state of law that was applied until 1998 [when the left-wing Socialist Party won legislative elections and governed the country up to 2002]. This is not against the constitution,” he said.

For a couple of weeks from Aug. 4 onward, the French government is closed for vacation. Elected officials are expected to get an earful of public concerns over the bill, and seek a solution to both strike hard against criminals and maintain the Constitution that dates back to the French revolution.