Unlike Obligations to Leave French Territory (OQTF), French Territory Bans (ITF) are not administrative measures but penalties pronounced by the criminal judge, primarily or additionally, when a foreigner is convicted in France for certain crimes and misdemeanors.
Curious to know the number of ITF sentences handed down each year, Senator (LR) of Alpes-Maritimes Henri Leroy asked a written question to the Minister of Justice on this subject.
Minister of Justice Éric Dupond-Moretti responded at the end of February, emphasizing that the number of ITFs pronounced by judges each year is increasing sharply.
It has doubled from 2021 in criminal matters: 221 sentences banning French territory were handed down in 2021, and 208 in 2022, compared to around a hundred each year previously.
And this number has more than tripled in correctional matters: if in 2014 1,800 ITFs were pronounced against foreign offenders, there were more than 6,200 in 2022.
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Two main reasons explain this sharp increase.
On the one hand, specifies Place Vendôme, the scope of crimes and misdemeanors punishable by an additional penalty of exclusion from French territory expanded in 2018 with the first law on immigration passed under the presidency of Emmanuel Macron .
Although it is still too early to measure its effects, the second immigration law, adopted partially but definitively after the opinion of the Constitutional Council in January 2024, further expands the scope of offenses likely to be punished by an ITF: from now on all crimes and misdemeanors punishable by at least three years in prison, and committed by a foreigner, can theoretically be punished by an ITF.
As with the OQTF, the penalties of inadmissibility are framed by guarantees: certain foreigners cannot be subject to these penalties, and in certain circumstances, when significant threats weigh on them for example, the judge does not cannot pronounce an ITF.
A desire recalled by criminal policy circulars
The second reason which explains the more massive use of ITFs would be, assures the Chancellery, a political will recalled on several occasions by criminal policy circulars transmitted to judges.
In particular a text from 2022, which
“encourages the pronouncement of additional ITF sentences against the perpetrators of drug trafficking”
, details the minister, or another that same year which also encourages the pronouncement of these measures against illegal migrant smugglers in Mayotte.
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Éric Dupond-Moretti further details that among foreigners sentenced to French territory ban, 6 out of 10 are nationals of an African country, 16% are European citizens and that other nationalities (or unknown nationality) constitute the remaining quarter .
Pronouncement of an ITF theoretically supposes that the convicted foreigner is then returned to the border, generally after the judgment, without necessarily the possible prison sentence being applied in France.
How many of these 6,500 French territory bans were actually followed by expulsion?
Since deportation to the border is the responsibility of the police or the gendarmerie, Éric Dupond-Moretti therefore did not answer the question, and passes the buck to the Ministry of the Interior - which has, for the moment, not , did not respond to requests from Le
Figaro.