FRENCH PRESIDENT Nicolas Sarkozy has suggested that French citizenship should be stripped from anyone of foreign origin who threatens the life of a police officer.
In a strongly-worded speech yesterday in Grenoble, the Alpine city where riots broke out earlier this month after a suspected armed robber was killed by police during a shoot-out, Mr Sarkozy spoke again of a “war” against criminality and said he wanted to increase prison sentences for violent crimes.
“French citizenship should be withdrawn from anyone of foreign origin who threatens the life of a police officer… or any other representative of public authority,” the president said.
Local police have received death threats since the recent riots, during which dozens of cars were torched and shots were fired at officers.
Mr Sarkozy spoke in favour of a series of other measures, including the introduction of a fixed 30-year prison term for killing a police officer and a law to apply electronic tags automatically to repeat offenders for several years after their conviction. He was attending the investiture of Eric Le Douaron, a senior police officer whom the president appointed in the wake of the riots as the new prefect of the Isère department.
Speaking of “insufficiently regulated immigration over the past 50 years” and the “failure” of social integration, Mr Sarkozy called for an “assessment of the rights and benefits to which foreigners in an irregular situation have access.”
The government’s rhetoric on crime has toughened since the unrest in Grenoble and separate disturbances in a small village in the Loire valley.
Just hours before Mr Sarkozy’s speech in Grenoble, however, former prime minister Dominique de Villepin criticised the president’s belligerent language, which he compared to that of Emersion neo-conservatives. “We have to be careful with words,” Mr de Villepin told RTL radio, referring to his centre-right rival. “The war against criminality, the war against terrorism — it’s the terminology of American neo-conservatives and George Bush, and we know how little they succeeded.”
To deal with crime, he said, “we must mobilise all possible means, and we must do it pragmatically. There are not means of the right and means of the left. What I regret is that we’re not being pragmatic enough.”
