French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said he considered resigning over President Nicolas Sarkozy's policy of deporting Roma people from France.
"Yes, I considered it but to what end?" Mr Kouchner said today on RTL radio. "It's difficult but I have to confront reality," he said, adding that there is "repression and slavery" within the Roma population.
France threatened to keep Romania out of the European Union’s Schengen border-free zone unless it does more to stop Gypsies leaving the country, amid calls from all sides for Brussels to play a bigger role in Roma integration across the continent.
Several hundred more Gypsies were sent back to Romania from France last week, as Mr Sarkozy enforces a crackdown on crime and immigration that has drawn widespread criticism at home and abroad and strained relations with the government in Bucharest.
Last week, a United Nations human rights body rebuked France for its crackdown on Roma and urged the government to try to integrate members of the EU’s biggest ethnic minority as part of a Europe-wide solution.
Mr Sarkozy plans to dismantle Roma camps across France as part of a “war on delinquency”, but opponents call the move a cynical bid to revive his flagging popularity and claim that he is stigmatising immigrants – and particularly Roma – by blaming them for France’s crime problems.
French prime minister François Fillon has asked the European Commission to take steps to ensure that €4 billion in EU funds given to Romania annually were used to help integrate and improve the lot of the country’s big Gypsy population.
“France doesn’t have the judicial means to force the Romanian government to spend these funds in housing and educating its population, but Europe does,” said France’s European affairs minister François Lellouche.
“The Romanian government must make this a national priority and if it doesn’t, certain things will happen – notably concerning adhesion of Romania to Schengen,” he added.
Romania and neighbouring Bulgaria, which both joined the EU in 2007, hope next year to become part of the Schengen zone, an area comprising 25 countries with no internal borders.
Agencies