French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira Quits Over Terror Proposals Ms. Taubira resigned over plans to allow dual citizens convicted of terrorism to be stripped of French nationality By Noemie Bisserbe and Stacy Meichtry
http://www.wsj.com/articles/french-minister-christiane-taubira-quits-over-terror-proposals-1453886549
PARIS—France’s justice minister resigned Wednesday after a clash with President François Hollande over his proposal to adopt a constitutional amendment stripping some homegrown terrorists of their nationality.
Christiane Taubira “agreed on the need to put an end to her mandate as the debate on the constitutional amendment opens in Parliament today,” the president’s office said. The president appointed Jean-Jacques Urvoas, a senior lawmaker, to succeed Ms. Taubira.
Her departure highlights the fault lines within Mr. Hollande’s Socialist Party over his strategy for tackling terrorism. His government has imposed a raft of state-of-emergency measures—permitting police to conduct warrantless raids and detain people without court orders—that critics say contrast with the French Republic’s status as a beacon of civil liberties.
However, it was Mr. Hollande’s recent decision to strip terrorists of their nationality—an idea long supported by France’s right-wing parties—that opened the divide with Ms. Taubira.
“I’m leaving the government over a major political disagreement,” Ms. Taubira said, after tweeting: “Sometimes you resist by staying, sometimes you resist by leaving.”
French law already allows the government to take away citizenship from convicted terrorists if they are born abroad. But Mr. Hollande was under pressure from France’s right-wing parties to go further.
In November, less than a week after 130 died in the Paris attacks, Mr. Hollande proposed that even people born in France would lose citizenship if they are convicted of terrorism.
The proposal came under fire from some Socialist Party members, including party heavyweight Martine Aubry, who warned that it would “divide, stigmatize and undermine some of the founding principles of the French Republic.”
In an attempt to head off criticism that the law would be discriminatory, the government said Wednesday that citizens with only French nationality could also lose some of their rights, such as the right to vote or run for public office, if found guilty of terror offenses. International law forbids countries from rendering people stateless by completely stripping them of all nationality.
ENLARGE “Those who think you are French, no matter what happens and what you do, are wrong,” said Stéphane Le Foll, government spokesman and a close ally of Mr. Hollande.
The appointment of Mr. Urvoas, a centrist close to the president’s law-and-order premier, Manuel Valls, tips the government’s balance of power further away from the Socialist Party’s left wing.
As chairman of a parliamentary committee that reviews pending legislation, Mr. Urvoas shepherded sweeping surveillance laws the government pushed through Parliament in the wake of the attacks on satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo’s newsroom and a kosher supermarket.
In recent weeks, Mr. Urvoas has been working closely with Mr. Valls on a draft of the constitutional amendment, said Mr. Le Foll.
Mr. Hollande’s decision to replace Ms. Taubira with a centrist also risks undercutting his efforts to rally the Socialist Party’s base ahead of presidential elections in 2017. He already faced resistance from leftist lawmakers who abstained from voting key economic laws.
Some Socialists have called on the party to hold primaries to nominate an alternative to Mr. Hollande, whose approval ratings have plumbed historic lows.
“It tells us something about how this five-year term is falling to pieces,” said Laurent Baumel, a Socialist lawmaker, on French television station BFMTV.
Ms. Taubira is a stalwart of civil liberties who championed the government’s push to legalize gay marriage in 2013. Her high profile, combined with her heritage as a black woman born in French Guiana, made her at times a target of racist slurs in public appearances and in right-wing media.
In November 2013, the far-right weekly newspaper Minute published a cover featuring a photo of Ms. Taubira and headlines that read: “Cunning as a monkey, Taubira finds her banana.” In French, “banana” is slang for “smile.”
On Wednesday, Ms. Taubira mounted her bicycle at the end of a public farewell ceremony and pedaled away.
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