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French President Emmanuel Macron is planning a new immigration law.
© Aurelien Morissard/AP
France's new immigration law is a key plan for President Macron.
Now the Constitutional Council has declared large parts of it inadmissible.
But the government is probably fine with that.
Paris - France's Constitutional Council has overturned a large part of a controversial new immigration law.
As the Council in Paris decided, 32 of 86 articles had no sufficient connection to the actual proposed law.
President Emmanuel Macron could now put the plan into effect without the deleted articles.
Under pressure from the conservative opposition party Les Républicains, with whose votes Macron's center camp wanted to pass the law, the text was tightened much more late last year than the government would actually have liked.
Macron and numerous parliamentarians then presented the law to the Constitutional Council.
The French Constitutional Council, similar to the German Federal Constitutional Court, reviews laws and projects for their legality.
What was deleted?
The Council has now canceled, among other things, changes to family reunification and the planned reintroduction of the crime of irregular residence.
The Council also viewed the fact that migrants should only receive housing subsidies and family allowances later than before as not directly related to the proposed law and deleted the relevant article.
The fact that the council is now withdrawing some of the tightening measures is probably in the government's interest.
As Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said, the Constitutional Council found the text of the law to be good, including the elements in which the government introduced it.
A number of the additions that had only been made in Parliament were declared inadmissible.
dpa