French Prime Minister François Bayrou threatened on Wednesday, February 26, to cancel a longstanding agreement with Algeria on free movement after a deadly knife attack in which the main suspect is a man of Algerian origin.
The row is just the latest in a series of disputes that has heightened tension between France and its former colony.
Bayrou spoke following a cabinet meeting held days after Saturday's knife attack in Mulhouse in which one person was killed and several others wounded. Prosecutors say the 37-year-old suspect is an Algerian-born man who was on a terrorism watchlist and subject to deportation orders. Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau has said that France had repeatedly attempted to expel him, but Algeria refused to accept him.
Bayrou said Wednesday: "The victims we saw in Mulhouse this weekend are the direct victims of the refusal to apply these agreements" between the two countries.
The suspect had been presented to the Algerian authorities 14 times and on each occasion, they had refused to take him back, he added. Under the 1968 accords between the two countries, Algerians enjoy favorable treatment on immigration matters in France. But Algeria has in recent months refused on several occasions to accept its citizens when France has expelled them.
Bayrou said France would ask Algiers to examine how the relevant agreements between the two countries were being applied, giving them a month to six weeks to comply.
If there was no response, then canceling the existing agreements would "be the only possible outcome," he added – even though "this is not the one we want." On Tuesday, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot announced travel restrictions on Algerian dignitaries.
On Wednesday, Barrot said those measures, involving several hundred people, had been in place for several weeks. Algiers has denounced the new measures as a "provocation."
This new dispute is just the latest in a series between two countries feeding the tension between Paris and Algiers. Bayrou also raised the question of French-Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal, who is being held in Algeria on national security charges, expressing "great concern" for his health.
And the Algerian senate suspended relations with its French counterpart in response to the latest visit by a senior French politician to the Western Sahara – this time by Gerard Larcher, president of the French Sénat. The vast desert territory is a former Spanish colony largely controlled by Morocco but claimed for decades by the Algeria-backed Polisario Front.