France to extend anti-riot powers by 3 months

PARIS - The French government said on Monday it would ask parliament to grant a three-month extension to emergency powers it invoked to help curb the worst urban violence in almost 40 years.

Although the violence dropped again overnight, police said youths destroyed 374 vehicles in petrol bomb attacks in the 18th straight night of unrest in poor suburbs in the Paris region and major provincial cities.

Disturbances erupted on October 27 after the deaths of two youths apparently fleeing police but grew into a wider protest by youths of African and North African origin at racism, poor job prospects and their sense of exclusion from French society.

Government spokesman Jean-Francois Cope told Europe 1 radio that Monday's special cabinet session would send to the National Assembly a bill extending the 12-day emergency powers act by three months from November 21, when the current measures expire.

"The bill allows the government to end them by decree before the expiry date if that is compatible with the goal of restoring public order," Cope said.

On November 8 the government of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin revived a 50-year-old colonial-era law to grant prefects, the government's top local officials, broad powers to impose curfews and other restrictions on designated areas.

The conservative government decree named 38 towns, cities and urban areas around France, including the capital Paris. However, few prefects have made use of the new powers.

It was unclear how the substantial extension of the life of the emergency powers would be greeted by the opposition Socialists, who invoked the same 1955 law when in government in the 1980s.

Some local mayors have already criticised the measure as an overreaction and potentially inflammatory. The government has a comfortable majority in parliament and the measure should pass with ease.

Rioters, who also include white youths, torched 1400 cars across France last Sunday but violence has dropped sharply since that peak.

Police said 10 youths were arrested in the southwestern city of Toulouse after youths burned 10 vehicles on Sunday and damaged a school, driving a burning car against its gates.

The disturbances are the worst in France since student riots in 1968 and have shaken the government of President Jacques Chirac, sparked a debate on the integration of immigrants and caused ripples throughout Europe.

In a bid to help tackle problems in French suburbs, the European Union has offered France 50 million euros ($86.15 million), EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso told Europe 1 on Sunday.

The main problem behind the unrest was youth unemployment but the challenge of integrating immigrants was shared by many European cities, he said.

"The best social politics is to create employment. That is the main thing. When you have 60 per cent of youths unemployed in suburbs it is a problem," Barroso said.

An editorial in Monday's Midi-Libre newspaper said the riots had hurt France's image abroad.

"Even if the violence isn't racial in origin the crisis in the suburbs brings the failure of France's social model ... to the fore and has highlighted the country's social sickness," it said in a signed editorial.

The Socialists accused Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy on Sunday of acting tough to increase his chances of becoming president in a 2007 election. Sarkozy has said he would throw out foreigners caught rioting.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the right-wing National Front party, called the unrest on Sunday a "a social atomic bomb" caused by immigration and said the rioters were "Chirac's children".

- REUTERS