French police report rise in racist and religion-based offences

Racist, xenophobic and religion-based hate offences surged 32 percent in France last year, according to a report released on Wednesday.

Graves desecrated with swastikas are seen in the Jewish cemetery in Quatzenheim, near Strasbourg, on February 19, 2019. Police in France registered nearly 9,000 racist or religion based offences such as the desecration of graves during 2023. © Reuters

Police forces said they recorded 8,500 crimes and misdemeanours targeting the victim's ethnicity, nationality, race or religion.

SSMSI, the French Interior Ministry's statistics service, highlighted a marked rise towards the end of the year – coinciding with the period following Hamas's attack on 7 October on Israel and the retaliatory campaign in Gaza.

"The increase can be seen from October, with a level of offences holding at the same high level in November before falling back in December," the report said.

France's Representative Council of Jewish Institutions (CRIF) said in January that it had recorded four times as many anti-Semitic acts last year as in 2022, at 1,676.

"There was an explosion in numbers after 7 October," it added.

Most racist, xenophobic or anti-religious acts were provocations, insults and defamation, the report found.

Men, people aged between 25 and 54, as well as citizens of African countries, were especially targeted, it added.

However, only four percent of victims filed criminal complaints.

'Paris danger zone'

The report said the rate of hate crimes in Paris was almost three times higher than the national average.

However, the SSMSI's data noted that the levels could be attributed to significantly higher numbers of foreigners and French people from other parts of the country passing through the capital than other areas.

In December 2022, during a visit to a World War II deportation camp in the south of France, French President Emmanuel Macron warned that xenophobia and anti-Semitism were on the rise in the country.

Following his tour of Camp des Milles on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence, Macron said, "The camp is not an accident of history, but the fruit of a deliberate slide toward genocide."

“Here, at the Camp des Milles, France was what it should never again become,” he added.

Some 10,000 people of 38 nationalities were interned at the camp, and more than 2,000 deported to Auschwitz, according to camp historians.

The round-ups began in 1939, nearly a year before German forces occupied northern and western France and installed a puppet administration over the rest of the country based in Vichy under Marechal Pétain.

(with newswires)