E/CN.4/1996/72 page 11 centres at airports and seaports, and even in major cities such as Paris with the Centres of Vincennes and Nanterre, and the former Centre at the Palais de Justice in Paris, of sinister memory. 40. The Special Rapporteur also considers that xenophobia and the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim movements should be perceived in the light of the fundamental question of the place that Islam has acquired in French society. Islam is the second religion in France. How is that religion to thrive in all its dimensions in a society that belongs basically to a Judaeo-Christian culture, and in a secular State, in a "citizen’s" republic as many people like to say, rather than a culturally pluralistic society of communities: cultural identity, cultural diversity, cultural complementarity, mutual cultural enrichment? 41. Will France accept, in the name of State secularism, Islamic schools in the same way as it accepts private Christian schools, subject to the same legislation and the same rules? These are all questions to which it was difficult to provide the Special Rapporteur with answers. The serious terrorist attacks of fundamentalist or integrist inspiration considerably complicated the situation. From this point of view it seems that France is facing not so much problems of economic and social development as a veritable crisis of society and civilization. It is this set of problems that prompts and feeds the wave of xenophobia that is sweeping across France and is directed in the main against people from the South while the construction of a greater Europe, which some people already regard as a fortress, continues. 42. The French authorities, and many individual voices, speak out to denounce and combat racism, the flood of aggressive xenophobia, and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim movements which are not due exclusively to the French far right. The public authorities and civil society have become aware of the danger of xenophobia and racism and of the sporadic manifestations of anti-Semitism. 43. Having taken the measure of these phenomena, the French authorities are endeavouring by strengthening anti-racist legislation, to reverse the trend. Justice is at work; in spite of its delays (cf. the Carpentras case: the desecration of a Jewish cemetery). 3/ Justice is endeavouring, not without difficulty, to ensure respect for the rule of law and for the international conventions to which France is a party. In addition, economic and social measures are being taken (municipal policy as the Special Rapporteur was able to see it in Lyons and Marseilles) to facilitate the progressive integration of immigrant populations resident in France. Lastly, the call for tolerance and for respect for the dignity of one’s fellow human beings, made by the religious communities and by various associations involved in the struggle for the rights and dignity of the individual, is steadily although slowly helping to bring about a change in attitudes. 44. A great deal remains to be done through systematic education in the rights of the individual, not through traditional civic education which the crisis of ideologies has emptied all content, but through an upsurge of French humanism to halt the deterioration in the image of the original homeland of human rights and the rights of the citizen.