France has started a process to ban the far-right French group Generation Identitaire, which is known to be hostile to migrants, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said.
Generation Identitaire has repeatedly tried to prevent migrants from entering the country, conducting high-profile raids in the French Alps and the Pyrenees.
“This organization now has 10 days to respond,” Darmanin wrote on Twitter Saturday night.
In January, French authorities launched an investigation into the group alleging incitement to racial hatred, following actions against immigrants in the Pyrenees.
Darmanin said at the time that he was considering closing the group.
On December 16, the Grenoble Court of Appeals released three Generation Identitaire activists who had been sentenced to six months in jail after trying to prevent migrants from entering the country via the Franco-Italian border in 2018.
The organization chartered two helicopters and a plane during the spring of 2018 to track immigrants trying to reach France by crossing the Alps.
Last November, France banned the Turkish far-right nationalist group The Gray Wolves following incidents in France involving the group as tensions between France and Turkey escalated, especially over the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
France has also cracked down on Islamist militants following the murder of a French school teacher last year.
Samuel Paty was beheaded on October 16 by an 18-year-old of Chechen origin, who sought to avenge his victim’s use of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a class on freedom of expression.
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