France is prepared to break European human rights law to expel “dangerous” foreigners as President Macron’s government pledges the toughest crackdown on immigration in 30 years.
Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister, said France would deport foreigners deemed a threat without waiting for the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to hear their appeals. If their removal was judged to have violated the European Convention on Human Rights, Paris would pay a fine but not allow them back.
Darmanin has put forward legislation — which will also extend the period of time that someone can be held in detention without bringing a charge — designed to woo traditional centre and hard-right voters who would typically vote for the Republicans party or Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.
He believes that as the terror threat rises amid the war between Israel and Gaza and the killing of Dominique Bernard, a teacher in Arras, northern France, by an alleged Islamist radical this month, public opinion is on his side.
Under the proposed bill, foreigners served with deportation notices could be detained for 18 months if they also have a criminal record or are on an intelligence agency watchlist while their expulsion process is handled. At the moment, they can only be detained for 90 days and are often released before the deportation procedure has been completed.
Advertisement
The minister also wants to make it easier to expel asylum claimants who fail to obtain refugee status and refuse residency permits to applicants who cannot speak French or who espouse radical Islam. Darmanin has drawn accusations that his hardline stance threatened to undermine Macron’s second term of office by jettisoning the pro-European values at the heart of the head of state’s agenda.
Backing sought from the right
Darmanin, who harbours aspirations for the Élysée Palace when Macron steps down at the end of his second term in 2027, declared there were “no taboos” in the fight against terrorism.
He is seeking to win right-wing support for his immigration bill, which will come before the Senate next month and the National Assembly in December.
Darmanin said that he had been justified in deporting two radical Islamists, one a convicted terrorist, to Russia even though the ECHR had said they would face torture there.
Without opposition support, Darmanin’s proposed legislation stands little chance of getting through both houses of parliament, where the government lacks an absolute majority.
Advertisement
Darmanin initially hoped to woo moderates on both left and right with a package that included a crackdown on asylum but also authorisation for illegal immigrants to stay in France if they found jobs in sectors where there were labour shortages.
Now the minister has given up hope of winning over the centre-left and is moving rightwards to woo Republicans MPs.
Echoes of Braverman
Darmanin drew up the battle lines by expressing the sort of reservations about the ECHR that Suella Braverman, the home secretary, has voiced in Britain. He notably attacked the court over its enforcement of the European Convention of Human Rights, which says that “everyone’s right to life shall be protected by law” and “that no one shall be subjected to torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”.
Darmanin said this stopped him from expelling foreign criminals, and notably radical Islamists, to countries where they risked the death penalty or torture. “But should we keep [them] with us when they can also cause death in our country?” he said. “What is the role of the interior minister? To protect the population.”
Darmanin suggested that France had been right to expel two criminals from the mostly Muslim republic of Chechnya last year after one had served a jail sentence for participating in a terrorist plot and the second was accused by the French interior ministry of being an Islamist radical.
Advertisement
The ECHR said the expulsion violated the European Convention on Human Rights because of the risk that the Chechens would be tortured on their return to Russia.
Darmanin said: “I think the French people ... find that it makes sense that someone given a ten-year jail sentence for terrorist activities can be expelled because they are very dangerous.”
Fines ‘a price worth paying’
Unlike Braverman, however, he said there was no question of leaving the convention. He said France would instead circumvent the court by expelling foreigners deemed to be dangerous before it had time to give judgment. He added that he did not mind if that meant paying a fine.
“We used to wait until we had the opinion [of the ECHR] even if that meant keeping extremely dangerous people on our soil. Now we don’t wait. We expel and we wait to see what the court is going to say. The consequence of that is indeed a fine,” Darmanin told the Journal du Dimanche.
A source at the Ministry of the Interior said the court’s fines were only €3,000 and added that it often took three years to give judgment.
Advertisement
Darmanin said 89 “radicalised foreigners” had been expelled since the start of the year. He says his new immigration bill will facilitate the procedure by removing a ban on expelling foreign criminals if they are married to a French national or if they immigrated to France before the age of 13.
The issue is sensitive given that the French teacher’s killer, a former pupil from Ingushetia, also a mainly Muslim Russian republic, was refused asylum but escaped expulsion because he had arrived in France at the age of five.
Writing in Libération, the left-wing daily newspaper, Thomas Legrand, a political commentator, said Darmanin was in effect claiming that “the rule of law prevents him from acting as he would like to ensure the safety of the French people”. He said that in other democracies, a minister would be weakened if he was found to have broken the law. In France, he “emerges reinforced”.
Legrand added that Darmanin was “ruining what was left of Macron’s fragile equilibrium [between left and right]. Emmanuel Macron is being robbed like a novice by the cunning interior minister”.
