PARIS — France is pushing for more scrutiny on how EU grants are allocated in an attempt to fight antisemitism, hate speech and the funding of entities “obviously hostile to our common values.”
France’s Europe Minister Benjamin Haddad also said he would ask Brussels “to reinforce the checks” on EU funding so money doesn’t go to operators “linked to antisemitism or Islamism.”
“It’s unthinkable and unacceptable that a single euro of European public money should finance organizations, associations and actors that are hostile to our values, linked to hatred, antisemitism or even Islamism,” Haddad said in Paris Monday.
Paris intends to present a proposal for discussion by the foreign ministers of EU member countries at the next General Affairs Council on May 27. The proposal, seen by POLITICO, says the EU needs to “increase its efforts” in the face of “an alarming increase of hate speech and hate crimes,” in particular following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attacks against Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza.
Israel’s ground and air campaign has killed more than 52,000 people in the Gaza Strip, according to the territory’s health ministries. Israel launched its campaign in response to the Hamas attacks in which 1,200 people were killed.
France’s focus on EU financing follows cases of EU money being used to fund campaigns that did not respect France’s secular values, or to allegedly fund entities linked to Islamist movements, said a person familiar with work on the proposal. Secularism — or laïcité — is enshrined in France’s constitution.
In 2021, the Council of Europe human rights organization ran a European Commission-funded anti-discrimination campaign featuring the slogan “freedom is in hijab,” drawing a strong backlash from France.
According to Le Figaro, which was the first to publish extracts of the proposal, France also wants to see grants given to the Islamic University of Gaziantep in Turkey reviewed following homophobic and anti-atheist comments by the university’s officials.
The French proposal suggests several ways to tighten the EU grants systems, including suspending financing for grant recipients who don’t respect the values set out by European treaties, stricter checks on grant applications, and drawing up recommendations for grants allocated by EU-funded agencies or programs such as Erasmus+.
France’s call for stricter rules on EU grants, which has the support of Austria, comes as European NGOs fear funding cuts amid a push by conservative European lawmakers for greater oversight over civil society lobbying activities.
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