Justice: Former Minister Noëlle Lenoir Implicated for Her Remarks on Algerians

Former minister Noëlle Lenoir is the subject of a complaint by SOS Racisme for making racist remarks targeting Algerians on CNews. Noëlle Lenoir, who was a member of the Constitutional Council between 1992 and 2001 and then Minister of European Affairs during Jacques Chirac 's second term, declared on Friday that "millions of Algerians [...] can pull out a knife in the metro, in a station, in the street anywhere, or take a car and walk into a crowd." She was responding to the Constitutional Council's decision to invalidate several key provisions of a bill that aims to toughen the detention of illegal immigrants in detention centers (CRA).

"Obviously, you should have heard thousands, not millions. Having corrected that, I stand by my words," she said in a statement on Wednesday. "I obviously did not target the Algerian community, which, as a whole, lives peacefully in France, but a minority subject to OQTF restrictions and which nevertheless remains on the territory of the Republic," she explained. She also said she was the subject of "death threats on social media and by phone, insults and defamation of an anti-Semitic and sexist nature," made anonymously.

Her lawyer, President of the Bar Francis Teitgen, said she was questioned Tuesday by the Paris police, who had received her complaint following these threats. The Paris prosecutor's office confirmed that it had received both the complaint filed by SOS Racisme and the one filed by Noëlle Lenoir for cyberbullying.

Noëlle Lenoir is president of the support committee for the Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, imprisoned in Algeria for more than eight months and sentenced on appeal to five years in prison for "undermining national unity."