France unveils plan to help fight racism
Name it, act on it, sanction it. That is the focus of a new drive against racism, anti-Semitism and discrimination of all kinds that was announced Monday by French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne.
The four-year plan starts with educating youth with a required yearly trip to a Holocaust or other memorial site exemplifying the horrors that racism can produce. It includes training teachers and civil servants about discrimination and toughening the ability to punish those denounced for discrimination.
Arrest warrants will be issued to those who use freedom of expression for racist or antisemitic ends.
Unusually, the plan includes fighting discrimination against Roma.
“There will be no impunity for hate,” Borne said, presenting her plan with 80 measures at the Institute of the Arab World.
Tolerance is on the rise, “but hate has reinvented itself,” she said.
“Our first challenge is to look squarely at the reality of racism and antisemitism and cede nothing to those who falsify history, who rewrite our past, forgetting or deforming some pages,” Borne added.
Some people working for years in French associations against racism and discrimination are skeptical about the plan, reject it outright or are reserving their judgment.
Even Kaltoum Gachi, a copresident of the anti-racist MRAP organization — which contributed a proposal — told the Associated Press that her group “will be vigilant to see if, concretely, (the plan) bears fruit.”
France's government has rolled out a succession of plans over five decades, the latest in 2018, to grapple with racism, antisemitism and discrimination. Still, the estimated number of victims who suffered as least one racist, antisemitic or xenophobic attack was 1.2 million per year, according to the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights.