France intends to “abolish” the agreement that allows senior Algerian officials to travel to the country without a visa

MADRID Jan. 13 (EUROPA PRESS) –

The French Minister of Justice, Gérald Darmanin, announced this Sunday his intention to “abolish” the 2013 Franco-Algerian agreement that allows senior officials from the Maghreb country to travel to France without a visa.

“There is an agreement from 2013 which is a Government agreement that allows those who have an official passport, an Algerian diplomatic passport, there are thousands of them, (…) to come to France without a visa to be able to move freely (… ) This institution must be abolished,” he declared in an interview on the French television channel LCI.

The minister has defended that this “retaliatory measure” will not affect the “ten percent” of French citizens “who have ties of blood, land, culture” with the African country, which was occupied by French troops between 1830 and 1962. It will also not include the ‘pieds-noirs’, Frenchmen who resided in Algeria during the French colonial period.

However, the abolition aims to “affect Algerian leaders who are in a position to make the decision to humiliate”, which the minister considers “more intelligent, more effective and can be done very quickly.”

These statements add to those of former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, who called for the “denouncement” of the 1968 agreement, which confers a special status on Algerians in terms of movement, residence and employment in France. This agreement, “we can denounce it, review it, it has been reviewed four times, it has also become a little obsolete,” said Darmanin.

“We are in a very critical moment and this humiliation that they want to inflict on us is not acceptable. It is a sovereign country that tries to say it and they are right, we must respect them. But they also have to respect us. Algeria must respect France, France must respect Algeria,” added the minister, at a time when relations between both countries, already tumultuous, have worsened with the case of the Algerian ‘influencer’ Doualemn.

The French authorities proceeded to transfer him to Algeria on Thursday, after he was arrested in Montpellier for encouraging the commission of violent acts on the social network TikTok, but they were forced to transfer him back again due to the local veto. The Algerian Foreign Ministry denounced the deportation as “arbitrary and abusive” and rejected French accusations of “escalation” and “humiliation.”

These cases open a new diplomatic front with Algeria, with whom France has already distanced itself precisely because of another arrest, that of the Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal. This author was arrested in mid-November in Algiers after returning from France, after he made some controversial comments about colonization.