Mission & Justice

Patrick Walters; 18/9/08

Australia and France have moved to strengthen bilateral security ties, with the defence force now able to use New Caledonia as a logistic support base for operations in the South Pacific.The agreement will allow Australian naval and military forces to re-supply and refuel as well as use repair facilities in the French territory. Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon said the agreement covering use of French defence facilities in New Caledonia would significantly help Australia. “We have an intense focus on the South Pacific that will be reflected in the coming defence white paper,” he said.

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6/8/08

France’s foreign ministry has accused Rwanda of making “unacceptable accusations” in a report alleging that French politicians and military played an active role in the 1994 genocide. The report named 33 French military and political figures, including Dominique de Villepin, the former prime minister, and Francois Mitterrand, the late former president, who it said should be prosecuted. It also accused French troops of directly taking part in the slaughter, which killed 800,000 people. Romain Nadal, the foreign ministry spokesman, said on Wednesday: “This report contains unacceptable accusations made against French political and military officials.”

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Emma-Kate Symons; 18/7/08

France has taken a united stand against the burka and the veil with a leading Muslim minister in Nicolas Sarkozy’s Government condemning head-to-toe Islamic dress as “a prison and a straitjacket”. Following a landmark appeal court ruling denying French citizenship to a Moroccan woman who wore a burka at the behest of her French husband, Urban Affairs Minister Fadela Amara said all Islamic coverings for women, including the popular head and shoulder veil or hijab were “symbols of oppression”. “The burka is a prison; it’s a straitjacket,” she told Le Parisien. “It is not a religious insignia but the insignia of a totalitarian political project that advocates inequality between the sexes and which is totally devoid of democracy.”

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24/6/08

Three rockets fired from the Gaza Strip have hit southern Israel, hours after Israeli forces killed two Palestinians in the West Bank.Tuesday’s incidents cast doubt over the future of a fragile truce that has been in force in Gaza between Israel and armed Palestinian groups during the last five days.Al-Quds, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad movement, took responsibility for the rocket attacks which caused sosome damage but no casualties in the Israeli town of Sderot. The rocket attacks followed an Israeli raid into the West Bank town of Nablus earlier during the day. Israeli troops killed the men in an exchange of fire, an Israeli military spokesman said, adding that one of them was a fighter from Islamic Jihad and the other was a “militant”.me damage but no casualties in the Israeli town of Sderot. David Baker, a spokesperson in the Israeli prime minister’s office, said: “Any rocket fire from the Gaza Strip would be a grave violation of the calm.”

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1/6/08

France plunged into a heated debate about its marriage laws on Friday after learning that a court had annulled the union of two Muslims because the husband said the wife was not the virgin she had claimed to be. Politicians, feminists and human rights activists denounced the verdict, handed down last month but only reported in the national press on Thursday, as an affront to the legal equality of men and women and a violation of a woman’s privacy. The hoodwinked husband’s lawyer responded just as forcibly that civil marriage was a legal contract. The court invalidated this one because the wife had lied about what French law calls an “essential quality” of a contracting party, he said.

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