Dr. Valerie Amiraux

(DRAFT:  Not to be cited without the consent of the speaker. This draft transcription has yet to be approved by the speaker.)

Thank you. I will go on with the same type of issues that take examples from the French situation on the basis of the report I've been asked to produce last year, and Maleiha knows the English version of it, by the Open Society Institute which was asking me to cover the issue of discrimination and minority rights of Muslims in France, which was obviously something very problematic as such in terms of political statement behind the project and I will give you some of the statements and results of this group. First I'd like to start by saying that the discussion yesterday inspired some remarks I would like to draw before entering into the topic. The first one is that as far as discrimination and minority rights are concerned in Europe, it is exactly the same as the discussion on citizenship and political rights discussion of yesterday, meaning working on Islam as a worship and Islam of the Muslims needs to be distinguished as such. I mean we are not talking of the same thing while talking on institutionalisation process or admission of collective rights to be identified as a believer community and on the other side all the social and political interaction that may be problematic between host society and minority populations. So mainly by that working on Muslims and on Islam. The worship means, innovatively, dealing with social and political questions that concern European societies as such and therefore people living there, but I think the controversy, which has come back to the forefront last Saturday, meaning the very issues, is very very explicit about that. That after 10 years of having tried to regulate the problematic around the very issue of the public spaces, we are still facing the same question, which is, it is an individual right, which has to be protected. Is it space we're discussing such a religious issue in the public French space, and is there a collective right to be protected behind this individual request of wearing a hijab. The second part of the statement's introductory remark deals with the relationship between state religion and the notion of inequality. I mean when I have been asked to work on discrimination in France those issues, for me, was to identify where this discrimination could be eventually absurd, denounced by Muslims and the first conclusion I had to make was that nobody enquired, in this perspective, I mean this commission covered for gender issue, for racial problems, for racism, for inequality, social economic inequalities, but not as far as religious belonging is concerned. So religion is absent from the discrimination problematic in France. Linked with that, you can't consider the issue of discrimination in general at large on the European level without dealing with its legal counterpart, which is the protection of minority rights, which is another problem in the French context, because raising the issue of minority rights is basically anti-constitutional. It does not belong to the national project, to the national spectrum. So dealing with discrimination is also raising the issue of is discrimination on individual rights, I mean on individual problematic or, again, is it a collective issue, and obviously you don't deal with the same type of problems, you don't observe the same types of interaction, you don't focus on the same sector. I mean you can deal with education, with employment, which are obviously the most important sectors for observing this kind of discrimination, attitudes, behaviours and selection, exclusion of population, but it's not the same in terms of scale of observation and legal response to the problems that are then raised. The last point I want to make before entering into the topic is that…. I agree with you when you say at the beginning that the national context still very much matters in the European perspective. I mean we are all talking about Europe and Islam, Europe and Muslim, etc, – there is not a single common European reaction and 11th of September is a very good example. It was stressed yesterday by many speakers, but I think the French context in the aftermath of 11th September is quite a good example, because in the study done for the ECRE institute, the main result was to show that in all countries belonging to the European Union there have been increasingly attacks and violence against Muslims, except in one country: France, where in the months following 11th of September, calm, quite population, many surveys showing at least 11th of September was a kind of demonstration of the ability among many leaders, political, opinion makers, journalists, to distinguish between Islam in and Islam out. So that is for me one of the strong demonstrations of the 11th of September. That in France, at least, there is a kind of public, political culture emerging being able to distinguish between what is going out, what is emerging outside of France and what is going inside the national context. So the post-11th September atmosphere has shown the extreme diversity and relevance of this national context as far as Islam and Muslims are concerned. Obviously the absence of reaction, of explicit reaction, does not mean that racism and xenophobia do not concern Muslims in France and I think the fact that we now have since two weeks, since 13th of April and the first general assembly of this new elected council which takes place on the 3rd of May, the fact that we have now an institution, which is in charge of collectively managing many issues, which are relevant for the Muslims communities in France, does not mean obviously that if the matter of equality has been Islam considered as an equal religion to other religion is solved, it didn’t solve the issue of what is the place of religion in the public space in France. And that is what is exactly what is going on since last Saturday. When the Minister of Interior made this discourse and followed the association who won the election, the discourse was very much approved by the assembly, by the audience, while the minister was raising the issue of the ability of the Muslims to have this council elected, assuming internal diversity being also controversial in the way it has been promoted and organised, but the problem came up when the minister raised two issues. The first one was the fact that it was recalling the existence of this vote did not mean that Muslims would have rights that should be specific and diverse from the other part of the population, taking a very clear example which is the wear of the veil on an identity card photo and stressing the fact that it's strictly forbidden by the law since 99 to wear a veil on an ID card photo. Immediate reaction of the audience was extremely, extremely shocking for somebody looking at it in front of the TV, but when you were inside the room, I mean attending the conference you could really feel first of all the disappointments by the Muslims attending the meeting, that the minister would tackle this opportunity of having a public discourse to raise this specific issue in front of them, who won the election, at least the political part of it. And the second part of the reaction was, mainly based on the fact that okay we are sitting at the table as Jorgen said yesterday, but we still do not have specific rights. And I think that's where discrimination comes into the picture. I mean the label discrimination in terms of dealing with Muslims and Islam, the worship in Europe is something really new. I mean it started at least in France very recently, mainly because we started asking question because some foundation asked us to do it. It raising the issue of the limit of the national institution to solve and to answer question raised by this type of population, meaning people who are claiming to be citizens, but in the same times or asking for the right to present themselves as believers, which is a question which has not been solved neither for other populations. So here we have a kind of banalisation in the French sense, not banalisation in the English sense. Banalisation in the sense of Islam is becoming normal, it's normalised. Islam is a worship which is sitting around the table, okay, but still there is discrimination argument to open the door to all the rest of these issues which are connected with the individual rights, public freedom and the role of the state in promoting certain public freedoms, controlling others and regulating this market of religious identities. What does it bring to speak in terms of discrimination? It's a relatively newcomer and I think it has a lot of interest and positive elements, which may help disentangling this individual, collective argument, first of all, not in terms of private and public, but really disconnecting what is made of individual request for specific rights and what is a collective presence of the worship in a European national space. Second thing, when we consider discrimination, according to a very minimalist definition, which should be the fact that there is an unequal treatment because of the belonging of the victim and belonging of the victim to a specific types of population. Because when you look at the French system, and the French legal provisions dealing with discrimination, what you notice since the beginning of the 70s is that it started with a very major, general road framework dealing with mainly racism and ethnic criteria and since the 70s until 2001, which is the implementation of the real global law for protecting against discrimination in the French framework, you have every year, these five years, a new criteria being added to this list. So it started with race, ethnic belonging, supposed or real, gender, handicap, illness, health problem, and then religion, political conviction, so it's a long list which has been changing during the last decade, but never properly identified separately in the legal provisions a law for a specific criteria. So religious discrimination doesn't exist in the French law. It exists among other criteria, but this poses obviously certain problems in terms of assessment. How do you assess that discrimination is based on a religious criteria or on a racial, ethnic or socio-economic criteria. What is the data, what is the point of observation of this specific relevance of the religious belonging. There is none, there is no data, there is no assessment possible in the French context, even if you use the records made by the hotline, the 10014 hotline, which the hotline that has been created in 2001 in order to be in compliance with European requirement of this directive protecting people against discrimination for race. This hotline is not giving any information in terms of… it's a phone number which is open all week from 7 in the morning till seven in the evening and you can call to denounce and to express a situation being yourself the victim or not being the victim, and you just denounce, explain the whole story you have been observing. Example, when people is interviewed for a job, you make yourself call because you think the job has not been allocated to you because you are Muslim, Arab or whatever, or the people in the room can call for saying, okay we have not been hiring him, but I think it should have been legitimate candidacy, it could have been the job for him, and because of different criteria he has not been hired. So this hotline has no record including religion as a criteria. It's a multiple complex made of different variables and religion is certainly part of it, but never expressed even after 11th of September. I've been looking at all the records after from 12th of September till the end of December 2001 – not a single assessment or reference to an explicit discrimination for religious motivation, meaning by that that there is not possibility to identify this specific criteria and ask for reparation, claim and eventually process trial and judgment. So religion does not exist as a concept in this discriminatory framework at the legal level. Another point which is important and I think should be in speaking of discrimination of Muslims in France is the fact that the way discrimination is becoming a legitimate tool to observe this problem social and political interaction between Muslim populations and non-Muslim populations in France is mainly corresponding to first a clear European request of inclusion in the national framework, of legal provisions, helping for fighting against discrimination and protection of minority rights. But it's also corresponding to the fact that the discourse, the main public dominant narrative inside France is changing as far as Islam is concerned. First of all, and the election of the board demonstrated it, it's publicly admitted by the authorities and the public agencies that Islam has not been treated equally and the board is an answer to that. Electing a board helping Muslims very actively since September 2002 to promote this board has been a way to publicly admit the fact that this equality should be anchored in an institution. First point. The second point is that in terms of immigration, integration, all the dominant narrative in France has been mainly based, articulated around integration, promotion…. Facing this integration discourse since '62, '63, the very beginning of the immigration movements. But there isn't change very officially in the title of the public agencies in charge of managing these problems. Now you have the Conseil de l'Integration who is writing reports on discrimination in France on fights against discrimination, protection of specific rights, we use the word specific, not minorities, because still again this issue of minorities, which of course a legal concept for discrimination discourse in Europe, cannot be raised as such in France without being immediately politicised. And I think this issue of discrimination is very much a knowledge that the Muslims as associations are invested. I'm just noticing that during this year 2002 until recently there have been more and more meetings, publications, expertise by lawyers especially requested by the association who organise even talking about minority rights in Europe, about the use of these legal provisions for fighting against discrimination by themselves for promoting a kind of new competence inside the associations looking at that, for the first time at the European level instead of the national one. So I think this is something which is not only in reaction to the European perspective of implementation at large of public policy of fighting against discrimination, it's also corresponding to the way Muslims communities and populations, at least in France, are considering themselves, are defining themselves not as a minority, but as a population that is not, penetrated, first, and second a population that is in need of specific recognition, not to be fighting against the other, but to have a specific space, arena in which this specific right as believers may have a voice. I think that European provisions for fight against discrimination may become in the following years very actively, at least I see it in the French context, for issues like the veil, new resource and opportunities for collective action at a legal level by these types of population.