PARIS — President Nicolas Sarkozy said Friday that as part of a “national war” on delinquency he wants to revoke the French citizenship of immigrants who put the lives of police officers in danger.
In a speech in Grenoble, the site of recent urban unrest, Sarkozy said the current list of causes for revoking French nationality would be re-evaluated and “rights and benefits” accorded to illegal aliens would be reviewed.
Meanwhile, a video posted on the Internet showing riot police roughly rousting African immigrant squatters, including one visibly pregnant woman, from an encampment at a housing project prompted shocked reactions around the country.
The video, shot by a member of a housing-rights organization, shows police pulling women, some with babies on their backs, and in one case dragging a woman across the ground with her infant trailing behind in the dirt.
No one was injured in the July 21 operation in La Courneuve, a suburb northeast of Paris, officials said, but humanrights advocates denounced the “brutal evacuation” of some 200 people.
Family Planning, an international women’s health group, issued a statement saying it was “scandalized, shocked, outraged and even sickened by the conditions” of the mass evacuation of women and children.
MRAP, a leading humanrights group, said people in the video had all been expelled from previous housing and provided with no long-term solutions.
The squatters physically resisted, “attaching themselves to each other, lying down, sometimes kicking and hitting police,” the government of the Seine-Saint-Denis region around La Corneuve said.
The evacuation was handled “according to legal procedures and rules in such circumstances,” and no one was injured, it said in a statement.
The French president, a former interior minister, named a former police official as prefect, the highest state authority, for the region around Grenoble after youths and police clashed this month at a housing project that is home to many immigrants.
Two days ago, Sarkozy ordered the expulsion of Gypsies living in France illegally, saying their camps should be “systematically evacuated.” That order came after police clashed this month with Gypsies in the Loire Valley after the shooting death of a youth fleeing police.
Sarkozy said he wants immigration laws changed to make it easier to expel people “for reasons of public order.”
Sarkozy traveled to Grenoble on Friday for the induction ceremony of the new prefect, Eric Le Douaron, and used the occasion to announce a new approach to delinquency that notably hits hard on immigrants who disobey the law.
“French nationality should be earned. One must know how to be worthy of it,” the president said. French nationality should be revoked “from any person of foreign origin who voluntarily threatens the life of a police officer” or other public authority, he said.
The violence outside Grenoble, in the southeast, was triggered by the police killing of a resident fleeing after an armed robbery at a casino. Officials said some youths fired on police in the ensuing unrest.
Tensions have simmeredin heavily immigrant projects around France since nationwide riots in 2005.
Human-rights organizations joined political rivals to denounce Sarkozy’s decision to target French of foreign origin.
“The xenophobia of Nicolas Sarkozy threatens democracy,” the League of Human Rights said. For the conservative leader’s main rival, the Socialist Party, “There are rules that are valid for all French ... You are French or you are not French.” Information for this article was contributed by Julien Proult of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 8 on 07/31/2010