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The bill, which was seen by AFP, also makes it a crime to share a person’s personal information in a way that allows them to be identified or located by people who want to harm them.
Family and colleagues hold up a photo of Samuel Paty during the ‘Marche Blanche’ in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, northwest of Paris, on October 20, 2020, in solidarity after he was beheaded for showing students caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad . Image: AFP
PARIS – A French bill to prevent radicalization, completed after the Islamist beheading of teacher Samuel Paty, makes it a crime to intimidate public servants on religious grounds, according to the text presented Wednesday.
The bill, which was seen by AFP, also makes it a crime to share a person’s personal information in a way that allows them to be identified or located by people who want to harm them.
The government of President Emmanuel Macron has cracked down on radical Islam following the gruesome murder of Paty, who was the target of a cruel online smear campaign for showing her students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a class on freedom of expression.
His assassination sparked an uproar in France, which has been repeatedly targeted by Islamist extremists since 2015, most of them French nationals.
Paty’s name was shared online by the father of one of her students, who labeled the teacher a “bully” in a video calling for her dismissal for the cartoons.
The father also exchanged messages with the killer of Paty, an 18-year-old Chechen refugee who traveled more than 80 kilometers (50 miles) from his home in Normandy to attack the teacher in the Parisian suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, where he paid a few students to point it out.
A few weeks before Paty’s death, Macron had already laid plans to address what he called “Islamist separatism” in poor French neighborhoods that aimed to create a “counter-society” where Islamic law would prevail.
As examples of the growing sectarianism, he cited children from ultra-conservative Muslim families who were taken out of school and sports and cultural associations were used to indoctrinate young people.
- ‘Hands off my teacher’ –
The bill drafted by Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin and Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti states that each child will be given an identification number that would be used to ensure that they attend school.
“We must save our children from the clutches of Islamists,” Darmanin told Le Figaro newspaper on Wednesday.
The bill also cracks down on online hate speech of the kind suffered by Paty by allowing suspects to be summarily tried.
“This law is, ‘hands of my teacher, hands of the values of the republic,'” Dupond-Moretti told RTL radio.
NGOs and charities suspected of being infiltrated by radical Islamists are also in the government’s sights.
The bill, which will be presented to the cabinet on December 9, stipulates that any association seeking public funding must agree to “respect the principles and values of the republic” and return the money if it is found to have broken the rules.
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