End Right to Citizenship By Birth, Says French Minister

The centuries-old right of any person born in France to claim citizenship should be scrapped because thousands of people are abusing the law to gain access to European standards of social security and healthcare in the French dependencies, a government minister said yesterday.

Faced with mass abuse of the droit du sol, a key republican principle since the 1789 revolution and a growing immigration crisis in France's overseas départements, François Baroin, the minister for overseas territories, said "no option should be ruled out".

The droit du sol, designed to populate the new post-revolutionary republic with legions of willing soldiers, originally gave every child born in France, no matter the nationality of their parents, the right to citizenship. It has since been withdrawn only once, by the collaborationist Vichy regime during the second world war.

In the early 1990s a rightwing government tightened the law, granting automatic citizenship only to children at least one of whose parents was also born in France. All others born on French soil are deemed to have a "calling" to become French, and can claim citizenship only if they are still in the country at 13.

But in France's overseas départements such as French Guiana, sandwiched between Brazil and Surinam, the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe and the Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, even a watered-down droit du sol is a powerful attraction for poverty-stricken neighbours drawn by the prospect of French social security and French healthcare.

Thousands of women from the nearby Comoros islands come to Mayotte to give birth in the clinic, the busiest in France with 7,500 births a year. Helped by middlemen, they pay a local Frenchman to falsely acknowledge the child as his, giving the infant French citizenship and the mother the right to remain in France. Similar scams exist in Guiana, whose population of 180,000 is set to double in within 20 years thanks to largely illegal immigration.

But the suggestion by Mr Baroin sparked an angry response. The Green party said it was "scandalous" to even consider such a measure; the Socialists said the droit du sol was "part of our history, a constituent of our identity"; and the human rights groups Mrap and SOS Racisme said the law was "an integral part of the republic" and that a partial suspension would be "unconstitutional, discriminatory and a wholly ineffective tool to fight illegal immigration".