French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira thinks National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange might be allowed to settle in France.
If France decides to offer them asylum she would “absolutely not be surprised,” she told French news channel BFMTV on Thursday (translated from the French). She said it would be a “symbolic gesture.”
Taubira was asked about the NSA’s sweeping surveillance of three French presidents, disclosed by Wikileaks this week, and called it an “unspeakable practice.”
Her comments echoed those in an editorial in France’s leftist newspaperLibération Thursday morning, which said giving Snowden asylum would be a “single gesture” that would send “a clear and useful message to Washington,” in response to the “contempt” the U.S. showed by spying on France’s president.
Snowden, who faces criminal espionage charges in the U.S., has found himself stranded in Moscow with temporary asylum as he awaits responses from two dozen countries where he’d like to live; and Assange is trapped inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape charges.
Taubira, the chief of France’s Ministry of Justice, holds the equivalent position of the attorney general in the United States. She has beendescribed in the press as a “maverick,” targeting issues such as poverty and same-sex marriage, often inspiring anger among French right-wingers.
Taubira doesn’t actually have the power to offer asylum herself, however. She said in the interview that such a decision would be up to the French president, prime minister and foreign minister. And Taubira just last weekthreatened to quit her job unless French President Francois Hollande implemented her juvenile justice reforms.
(This post is from our blog: Unofficial Sources.)
Photo: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images