An Inter Press Service Feature
PARIS, Jan 19 (IPS) - Human rights organisations, repelled by the perverse impacts of French severe immigration laws are contemplating seeking justice in international courts.
Herve Derriennic, spokesman for the French non-governmental organisation (NGO) 'Terre des Hommes' (Land of Men), said they were studying very closely the legal options after seeing how French immigration laws violate several international conventions.
Terre des Hommes released this week its own study with details on how French immigration laws have breached the rights of children and of families to stay together enshrined in a number of international agreements ratified by France.
Although immigration laws have become stricter since the 1980s, the study centred on the havoc wrought by the restrictions sought and won by the current Interior Minister Charles Pasqua.
According to the organisations, France has violated such agreements like the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1990 European Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Liberties, and the 1989 International Convention on the Protection of Children's Rights.
Collaborating with the NGO were some of France's major confederations of associations battling for the rights of children and for the welfare of families, some of which are discovering the abuses of the immigration laws and fighting this kind of battle for the first time.
"One could not say that until the last months of 1993, the family movement was confronted with the problems over immigration," said Ruben Urrutia, former secretary general of the National Council of Secular Family Associations (CNAFAL).
"The situation is scandalous and the family movement cannot allow this kind of situation to go on," added Urrutia, now president of the European Network for the Defence of Families' Rights.
The study, while not exhaustive, is based on the testimonies of immigrants and confirms what human rights and migrant organisations have dreaded all along: the immigration laws, with its ruthless pursuit of illegal foreigners, are tearing families apart.
The Defence Committee has so far received complaints from more than 700 mixed-race couples and over 200 from immigrant parents whose children are considered French.
In all of these cases, the illegal immigrant is unable to put his or her legal papers in proper order and risks or has been deported. In cases where the immigrant is protected from deportation, he or she remains illegal and as a result, is not allowed to work.
Mayors have refused to marry mixed-race couples where one is an illegal immigrant on the suspicion that each marriage with illegal immigrant is one of convenience.
Attempting to follow administrative procedures has also become risky business -- after making themselves known as illegal immigrants to the authorities, parents or spouses court deportation.
"Squealing on an illegal immigrant has taken on incredibly enormous proportions. Everyone squeals these days. Teachers, neighbours, grocers, post office clerks, doctors and nurses," said Patrick Mony of the Immigrants Information and Support Group (GISTI) which helped in the writing of the study.
GISTI personnel, said Mony, has come to warn the immigrants coming to seek counsel and legal help of the stakes.
"We have been forced to tell them that although we would like to speak about their cases with the authorities, the authorities may come after them to deport them," said Mony.
Narrated in the study is the ordeal of Diana and Gilles, who married without difficulty in April 1993. Diana is from Peru who was an undocumented immigrant at the time of the marriage but because the laws then still accorded full rights to a spouse to a French, she was given a one-year residence permit.
In August, however, the couple received an urgent call from the local prefect under the guise of reviewing Diana's file. Diana saw her residence permit confiscated and the couple has failed to get it back.
Until the first wedding anniversary, the couple lived in perpetual fear of seeing Diana deported. Diana cannot be deported now, but the human rights organisations say, can stay illegal until the authorities decide otherwise.
Dorine is from the Ile Maurice, born in France and lived in France since 1985. Her first attempts to regularise her legal status failed until she eventually married a Frenchman.
Pregnant in 1993, she tried again but was arrested instead. Freed the first time due to her pregnancy, Dorine was arrested and deported on her second appointment with the prefect with only 30 francs in her pocket.
Her husband was not informed she had already been deported until she was already in Ile Maurice where she eventually lost their baby.
The Pasqua Laws, said Helene Rubak of the French Network for the Right to Live as a Family, have raised all sorts of perversions. "We have started hearing of an oddity like 'temporary French citizenship', where one is granted French citizenship and then loses it when the authorities find the tiniest loophole."
Like many others, she has also begun hearing spiteful remarks from employees when they go to the different government offices to regularise immigrants' papers.
"Why don't the French people just marry the French?, the employees would spit out. If you don't call that ethnic cleansing, what is it?"
© Inter Press Service (2014) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service