Tunisians do not ask France and other European countries to automatically obtain visas; they ask to be treated well, and to be treated with dignity, and in particular without prejudice.
Since yesterday evening, 371 testimonies received of totally unjustified visa refusals and always with the same insulting reason: “We have doubts about your desire to leave the Schengen area before your visa expires”. More clearly, it is believed that you wish to migrate clandestinely.
A trial of intention
France is free and sovereign, and has the right to accept whoever it wants on its territory, to make quotas or other restrictive measures.
On the other hand, there is a right that she does not have, it is that of being insulting, vexatious and defamatory towards those she refuses. Whether this refusal is linked to a lack of personnel to deal with the files, whether it is the result of a political showdown, whatever it may be, it does not authorize the humiliation of one’s neighbor by making him the trial of intention to want to break the law and lend him the will to want to settle clandestinely.
And then what? Tomorrow, are we going to deny access to certain stores to a category of individuals on the pretext that we think they want to carry out a hold-up?
France is free to define the conditions of its migration policy, but that does not authorize it to engage in this trial of intent against those who ask it to be able to come and visit it.
We are not asking for the automatic obtaining of visas, we are asking to be treated well, and to be treated with dignity, and in particular without any trial of intent.
A deep vexation
I am thinking particularly of this file of a local banker, asked at each French meeting in Tunisia to intervene on finance and the macroeconomy, invited to almost every Franco-Tunisian economic event and who has just had his request for visa on the grounds that it is believed that he intends to stay in France after the expiry of his visa.
I am thinking of this young man, who did all his schooling in the Aefe system, whose parents bled themselves to offer him these expensive studies, betting on the Franco-Tunisian bilateral relationship, and who at 18, with a French baccalaureate in his pocket, was refused his study visa for a French university after 15 years spent in the French system in Tunisia.
I think of this renowned lawyer, and her refusal of a visa for the same insulting reason. To this doctor, to this executive, to all those who told me what they experienced as deep vexation. I think of them, and I offer them my most sincere apologies for this humiliation.
What meaning does the bilateral relationship carry, Mr. Ambassador of France to Tunisia, when your visa policy is so restrictive? And once again, whatever the nature of your policy in this area, it does not authorize you to humiliate the Tunisian actors in this relationship when you respond to their request to come and visit you.
In my opinion, the French deputies must seize a parliamentary inquiry on the subject, because some still defend a certain idea of France and its universalist base which its Enlightenment has notably consecrated.
