Murder of French Student Sparks Backlash Over Immigration
New French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau vows to tighten immigration and crime policy following murder of female university student by Moroccan citizen. (Wikimedia Commons)
The murder of a 19-year-old female student in Paris who went missing on September 20 has sparked intense backlash over the country’s immigration laws after authorities identified the suspect as a Moroccan citizen. According to BBC, officials found the victim’s body in the Bois de Boulogne park on September 21 and identified her only as Philippine.
Her parents reported Philippine as missing around 11 p.m. on September 20 after she failed to return to her parent’s house that day after lunch, writes the Brussels Times. Philippine was a college student at the Paris-Dauphine University studying economics. Her family organized a search party in the Bois de Boulogne, where her phone reported her location. They found her body with multiple injuries and alerted the police.
Reuters reports that authorities arrested the murder suspect in Geneva, Switzerland on September 24, where he awaits extradition back to Paris. The suspect is a 22-year-old Moroccan man convicted of rape in 2021, according to The Guardian. Authorities released him from the detention center in June and gave him an expulsion order from France but failed to enforce it before the murder.
France deports more non-EU citizens than any other country within the European Union, but does not enforce many of the orders, writes Reuters. France ordered the expulsion of 34,190 non-EU citizens in the first quarter of 2024, almost a third of all expulsions within the EU during that period. However, authorities only deported 4,205 people. According to France24, France only enforces about 7 percent of their deportation orders, a rate significantly lower than the 30 percent the rest of the EU averages.
As a result of the French parliament elections of summer 2024, the far right holds significantly more power in French politics, reports Reuters. The far-right National Rally (RN) party has the power to push for a vote of no confidence against the new Prime Minister Michel Barnier, thus holding significant sway over his government. Many within the RN have placed blame on the government’s weak stance on immigration following the murder. The Guardian reports that the leader of RN, Jordan Bardella, said that “our justice system is lax, our state is dysfunctional and our leaders are letting the French live alongside human bombs” in response to the murder. Left-wing Sandrine Rousseau of the Ecologists stated that while the murder should be “punished severely,” she feared that the far-right would “exploit it to spread its racist and xenophobic hate," according to BBC.
The immigration policy fallout from this murder will be the first test of the new interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, appointed with the rest of the cabinet on September 21, reports BBC. Retailleau is a hardliner from the conservative Republicans party in France, writes Reuters. Before the murder, Retailleau had already stated that France would likely tighten its immigration policies and security measures, following the rightward trend throughout Europe. In a statement Retailleau expressed that he is already looking into changing the laws to make sure that another case like this does not happen: “It is up to us, as public leaders, to refuse to accept the inevitable and to develop our legal arsenal, to protect the French. If we have to change the rules, let’s change them.”