Noëlle Lenoir, the former Minister of European Affairs, has got into trouble over remarks about Algerian people she made on the French TV Channel CNews.
She is the target of a complaint by the left-wing NGO SOS Racisme for what she said.
Lenoir retracted her remarks partially and justified them in a press release on August 13.
On French TV, the former minister had said “millions of Algerians … can pull out a knife in the subway, in a train station, in the street, anywhere, or take a car and drive into a crowd.”
Lenoir said that after a court decision to invalidate several key provisions of a text aimed at tightening the detention of foreigners in an irregular situation in detention centres, and shortly after an incident in a migrant camp where firefighters were trying to tackle a blaze were attacked.
During the same August 13 episode, Lenoir also claimed migration had run out of control and was impossible to manage for an open democracy such as France’s.
She said in her opinion the regime in Algeria had no qualms about removing illegals from its territory, even violently, but that France was afraid to do so.
“We should not accept to have people in our country that detest us,”,she said, “or who don’t understand our rules.”
SOS Racisme said in its complaint to the Paris prosecutor’s office, sent to the news agency AFP: “The remarks transcribed above meet the necessary conditions for the qualification of the offence of public insult on the basis of origin, belonging or non-belonging to an ethnic group, a nation or a religion.”
A collective of progressive French citizens, researchers and community activists on August 13 published an open letter calling on the independent constitutional authority Defender of Rights, the president of the Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication (Arcom) and the Prosecutor of the Republic of Paris to investigate the remarks.
The group alleged that, according to the law, Lenoir could face up to one year’s imprisonment and a fine of €45,000, with additional penalties for public incitement to discrimination, hatred or violence, public insult of a racist nature and public defamation of a racist nature, which had the same penalties.
Lenoir stressed that she had exaggerated the numbers but not the problem.
“Obviously, we had to hear thousands and not millions. This corrected, I stand by my words,” she said.
“I obviously did not target the Algerian community which, as a whole, lives peacefully in France, but a minority hit with OQTF [obligation to leave French territory] and which nevertheless remains on the territory of the Republic.”
Lenoir added that she had been receiving anonymous “death threats on social networks and by phone, insults and defamation of an anti-Semitic and sexist nature”, and her lawyer told AFP she had filed a complaint following these threats.
The Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed having received both a complaint from SOS Racisme and from Lenoir.
Lenoir is currently president of the support committee for the writer Boualem Sansal, a prominent Algerian-born novelist and essayist who has been criticising Islamism and the Algerian regime. He was arrested in November 2024 at Algiers airport after making controversial comments about colonial-era borders between Algeria and Morocco in a French media interview.
Lenoir was a member of the Constitutional Council between 1992 and 2001 and was in charge of European affairs during former president Jacques Chirac’s second term (2002-2004).
According to official statistics in France, Algerian migrants have much higher crime rates than French citizens.
🔴 Soutien total à Noëlle Lenoir @noellelenoir. Tous les chiens de garde du mensonge diversitaire lui tombent dessus, alors qu'elle ne fait que dire la vérité et les faits. Nous devrions TOUS la soutenir. Ras-le-bol de cette tyrannie victimaire. https://t.co/1BoswfXbHq pic.twitter.com/eWWI7vzoxB
— Outofnone (@Outofnone1) August 13, 2025
