News

France seeks to preserve influence in bigger EU

France, one of the founders and most active member states of the European Union, is struggling to adapt to a much-bigger bloc which it fears will water down its influence and challenge its leadership on EU foreign policy, European experts said.

Those concerns, and the wariness it has engendered among many of the 10 new EU members towards Paris, could cause strains along the way, they said.

That explains why “France has been dragging its heels over enlargement,” Philippe Moreau-Desfarge of the French Institute on International Relations said.

France suspends imam's expulsion order

An administrative court here cleared a path on Friday for the return to France of a Muslim prayer leader who was expelled to Algeria after he condoned wife-beating and the stoning of women.

The expulsion order was temporarily suspended by the court, which noted that the deportation of the prayer leader, Abdelkader Bouziane, separated him from his family in France.

The ruling allows Bouziane to return to France, although at his own cost, at least until the court rules in several weeks whether the expulsion order was legal.

The court did not order the French government to arrange his return but expressed “serious doubt” about the order’s legality.

Gay marriage spreads to France

France is set to have its first same-sex wedding this year, after a local Mayor took exception to the lack of access to marriage for lesbian and gay couples.

Noel Mamere, mayor of the town of Begles in south west France, has said he will conduct the ceremony for the two men in June, after finding no laws in the country that could block it. Although not marriage, France has offered civil union ceremonies, similar in the rights and responsibilities to our currently debated Civil Partnerships bill, since 2000.

Villepin targets non-French imams

Speaking a day after he deported an Algerian imam for saying Islam let husbands beat adulterous wives, Villepin urged the country’s prefects Thursday to expel any foreign preacher who advocated violence, hate, racism or abuses of human rights.

Only about 10 percent of imams in France are citizens and about half of all imams in the country speak French, experts say.

Most are imported from Arab countries, where some have been trained in radical Islamist views that clash with France’s secular laws.

Chirac undecided on EU constitution referendum for France

President Jacques Chirac has not yet decided whether he will hold a referendum in France on a proposed EU constitution, as Britain has declared it will do, a government spokesman said.

“As far as France is concerned, two paths are possible and provided for by the constitution,” spokesman Jean-Francois Cope told journalists.

The two options for ratification he was referring to were a plebiscite and parliamentary approval.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Tuesday announced a U-turn on his previous plans to say his country would hold a referendum.

French strike threat over Cannes film festival

STRIKING showbusiness workers in France have threatened to disrupt next month’s Cannes film festival.

The film industry website Screen Daily has said that a group representing the workers has planned an “occupation committee” for the 57th festival.

Picasso sought French citizenship

Spanish artist Pablo Picasso applied for French citizenship just before German troops invaded France in 1940, but was turned down because police saw him as a Communist sympathiser, a new exhibition shows.

Picasso’s brief letter of application, featuring his instantly recognisable signature, is the highlight of an exhibition of 40 years of police surveillance of the celebrated artist, which opened at the Paris Police Museum on Tuesday.

The records, among hundreds of files stolen by the Nazis during World War Two and seized by the Russians in 1945, lay in KGB vaults in Moscow for decades before being returned to France in 2000.

Appellation boss calls for overhaul to French system

The head of France’s appellation authority, René Renou, has called for a new quality standard in French wine, to stand above the current AOC system.

The President of INAO (Institut National des Appellations d’Origines), speaking at a seminar at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons in Oxfordshire, said he was proposing a wholesale revision of the laws which categorise French wine; the most sweeping changes since the system was introduced.

France to close last coal mine — and two centuries of sooty history

France on Friday is to close the last of its coal mines, ending an industry that, after more than two centuries of toil and occasional tragedy, became doomed because of reliance on nuclear energy and cheaper competition abroad.

The excavation of a symbolic final block of the compressed black carbon from the La Houve mine near the eastern town of Creutzwald is to be a highly symbolic moment for the country and Europe on many levels, underlining personal, historic, social and economic and political transformations.

“We are worn out by years spent underground, without ever seeing the daylight, and for that we are happy to stop,” said one miner, Yves Cerati, who spent 24 of his 43 years in the depths of La Houve.

Opinion: Good News & Bad News from France

In early March, while meeting with French officials in Libya, I suggested that if President Chirac wanted to repair the damage done to U.S.-French relations by French behavior last year, he might start by “putting a new face on French diplomacy.”

Just three weeks later, Chirac announced that he was replacing foreign minister Dominique de Villepin with the relatively unknown, but pro-American, Michel Barnier.

Known for his arrogance and love for grandstanding, Villepin was reviled in America for having sandbagged U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell at the United Nations last year, a disgraceful episode I have detailed in my new book, The French Betrayal of America.