An ‘exponential rise in complaints related to foreign people’s rights’ since 2020 has been flagged up by France’s Défenseur des Droits (Rights Defender) service, with the year 2024 confirming the trend.
Its new report, for the year 2024, also warns about the increasing use of AI by public services.
More than a third of some 103,000 complaints in 2024 related to foreign people’s rights, most of them concerning the issue or – especially – renewal of residency cards, states the Défenseur.
Read more: Did you know? France has a team ready to defend foreigners' rights
“A large proportion” revolved around “public services adopting paperless systems too rapidly, without having sufficient staffing and technical expertise or maintaining alternative ways to complete formalities”.
The ‘Anef’ website now used for many kinds of residency card application, is singled out, with the report stating that “difficulties are made worse, on the one hand by legislation which tends towards toughening the conditions for the issue of long-lasting residency cards, including multi-year cards and resident’s cards, and on the other hand the many failings of the Anef platform.”
Since it was introduced in 2020, “the Défenseur has received a large number of complaints from people who are no longer able to complete the formalities required to obtain a residency card, or to receive a response in a reasonable time, including where it was simply a case of renewal”.
Technical issues
People who, due to technical issues, are not able to complete a procedure, “can find themselves, at least temporarily, without proof of their right to live in France,” the report says, adding that this can in turn lead to “loss of the right to work, loss of jobs, suspension of social benefits, loss of housing or healthcare access difficulties”.
Défenseur legal expert Benoit Rey is quoted saying the service had made prior recommendations in the event that the decision should be made to place card applications entirely online via the site.
“Yet, in four years, if the proportion of foreign people among the complaints has exploded, it is, in a large degree, due to the malfunctions, limits and unplanned-for aspects of Anef,” he said.
“…The systems that exist to ‘accompany’ users are insufficient and prefecture officials, already working in very poor conditions and often unable to cope, faced with users’ problems, cannot compensate for the failings of their new tool.”
He said the priority is to ensure that all users should be able to complete their procedures via a traditional method (ie. posting or handing in documents) instead, if necessary.
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The issue of so-called ‘dematerialisation’ [procedures being put online as opposed to being completed on paper] does not, however, only affect foreign people, the Défenseur states in the report.
It received 600 complaints about the – mostly online – process for obtaining MaPrimeRénov’ renovation grants, as well as a “large number” about the INPI website for business formalities.
The latter included foreign people (EU citizens as well as non-EU foreigners without 10-year residency cards) and people without smartphones who found themselves unable to complete ‘electronic signatures’ on the site due to not having access to the service FranceConnect+.
Those without smartphones are now being advised instead to designate a proxy – who the Défenseur states can simply be a friend with a phone, meanwhile INPI was quoted saying that the necessary “correction work” had been done to allow access by the foreigners.
An increasing use of FranceConnect+ for different online formalities had, in general, given rise to “numerous” complaints from foreigners.
Read more: Alert raised over poor French residency services for foreign people
The report also notes that as more procedures go online, more people are relying on the France Services network, which has “become central in relations between users and public services”.
Many regional delegates of the Défenseur, who often meet the public at these centres, report user satisfaction with them.
However, the report says it is crucial that they continue to be sufficiently funded – especially in certain disadvantaged urban areas where they are ‘saturated’ – and that their advisers should have access to good contacts in public bodies who can help them resolve complex cases.
Long waiting times
Driving licence procedures are another “regular” source of complaints, though the Défenseur notes efforts being made by the Interior Ministry to “improve the waiting times”.
With regard to AI, now “massively deployed in numerous aspects of daily life”, the Défenseur says “it can bring improvements” but it also poses “major risks for rights and freedoms”.
It states that, for example, where administrative decisions are “partly automated”, a person is meant to still play a significant decision-making role, “however this intervention is sometimes non-existent” including, in some cases, decisions on allocation of lycée or university places.
Read more: Foreigners among the losers amid France’s ‘excessive digitisation’
A Défenseur IT expert, Gabrielle du Boucher states : “Today many public services use algorithms, whether to calculate the amount of people’s taxes, social benefits, attribute places in creches or access to higher education, or to target checks against social security or tax fraud.
"Increasingly complex AI systems are deployed, whether to identify risky behaviour in public spaces or to give fast written answers to public service users by generating text automatically.”
The Défenseur says human surveillance of the systems must remain, there must be transparency [regarding use of AI] and no discriminatory bias resulting from use of these technologies.
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