Immigration Laws: February, 1999 - Number #14

The National Front split in January 1999, with Bruno Megret (a University of California Berkeley graduate) elected to head a new National Front--National Movement party. The new party includes 62 of the Front's 95 local secretaries, half the 1,700 members of its internal security service, and Le Pen's three daughters. Megret is an advocate of forming coalitions with mainstream rightist parties to win power. In the Rhone-Alpes (Lyon) region of France, where a member of one of the mainstream rightist parties was elected President of the region with leftist-party support, replacing another rightist elected with the support of the National Front.

A defiant Jean-Marie Le Pen said that he could still command the loyalty of over 90 percent of the National Front's 42,000 members and the three million French voters who have supported the National Front in recent elections. Le Pen assembled the National Front in 1972 from a number of right-wing parties and has been its leader since.

Headscarves. On January 8, teachers at a junior high school in Flers (Normandy) went on strike, refusing to teach after education authorities ordered the acceptance of a 12-year-old Muslim girl who regularly wore a headscarf. A 1994 government decree banned "ostentatious religious symbols" on students. The teachers say that the scarves are symbols of an Islamic "fundamentalism" that prevents the girls from becoming part of French society.

National education officials, on the other hand, said that the French constitutional court in 1996 ruled that religious garments could not be banned in schools. Nevertheless, in southern France, two sisters aged 12 and 13 have not be allowed to attend school since October 1998 because they refuse to remove their headscarves in the classroom.

French Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement in January 1999 called for more immigrants in the French police. Chevenement said there were two million youths in France under the age of 20 born of immigrant parents, many of whom live in neighborhoods with insufficient police. At the same time, Chevenement has denounced juvenile offenders as "savages" and called for judges to impose financial penalties on parents who fail to control their children.

On January 18, a joint session of the French parliament ratified the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, under which EU member nations will eventually permit the EU to determine immigration policy. The votes of approval were 460 to 66 in the National Assembly and 240 to 34 in the Senate.

France is likely to be the last of 15 EU members to ratify the treaty. Opponents of ratification wanted a referendum on the surrender of sovereignty to the EU on immigration.

Robert Graham, "Immigration control surrendered," Financial Times, January 19, 1999. "Muslim headscarf draws teachers' ire," Agence France Presse, January 9, 1999.