euro|topics - Claude Weill

21/11/2008

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Weill, Claude

4 articles of this author have been cited in the European Press Review so far.

Le Nouvel Observateur - France | 01/11/2007

Claude Weill considers NGOs should be held to account

The columnist Claude Weill notes that "A formidable revolution has been unfolding for years now: the birth of a new civil society. Gone is the time for leaders to secretly plot how the world goes round behind closed doors. They now have to pay heed to the enthusiastic, vigilant, civil Internationale that the world's NGOs march to. The world is an agora plugged into CNN and the Internet. This revolution marks the evolution of democracy. Let us be careful that it does not lead to the regression of world leadership, for it is not enough to be against the system in order to be right. Nor is it enough to speak of morals in order to do good. ... If the NGOs act in place of States, they too must be prepared to justify themselves."

Le Nouvel Observateur - France | 20/09/2007

Claude Weill condemns DNA discrimination

French Members of Parliament recently adopted the amendment of an immigration law that authorises, as an experiment, the use of DNA tests for asylum seekers applying for family entry and settlement. The columnist Claude Weill is outraged. "In France, genetic identification tests are only authorised if a judge opts for them in a case seeking or contesting paternity. This amendment introduces a discriminatory and therefore anti-constitutional tendency, according to some jurists. The problem is that the cost of tests (which the applicant has to pay for) is prohibitive for many candidates. Double discrimination. ... [It is explained to us that] this procedure could only be used with the permission of those concerned. What chance of obtaining a visa have those who refuse to submit themselves to a test requested by the consular authorities?"

Le Nouvel Observateur - France | 13/09/2007

Claude Weil denounces the instrumentalisation of History

"An unlikely posthumous fate: sixty-six years after his death, here is Guy Môquet, the young communist shot dead by the Germans on October 22nd in 1941, promoted to the status of official hero in Sarkozy's Republic", writes the columnist Claude Weil on on the French president Nicolas Sarkozy's decision to make all French high schools read, on October 22nd, the letter Guy Môquet wrote to his parents on the eve of his execution. But for the columnist, though this letter "is heartrending, its historical importance is slender. It mentions nothing of his engagement, of his ideals as a young communist, nothing about the context. It is hard to see what reading it might trigger among today's high school pupils other than a surge of emotion, a moment of patriotic, emotional and a-historic communion. Is this not a manipulative instrumentation of history?"

Le Nouvel Observateur - France | 22/03/2007

Debate on French national identity

Nicolas Sarkozy, right-wing candidate in the Presidential election, has provoked heated debate in France by proposing the creation of a 'ministry for immigration and national identity'. For commentator Claude Weill, "there is no irrefutable definition of what it means to be French. … In France, whose population and relation to the world have been ceaselessly stirred by history, national identity is a shifting and plural reality. It is also highly relative. It is a questioning of the past, a subject for reflection for philosophers and citizens alike, an inexhaustible source of ideological confrontation. … It is not a given. Every individual has his way of living out national identity and that's as it should be because it belongs to everyone. It is not the role of a minister, much less of a political party, or the current majority to decree 'what it means to be French'."

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