'Fake virgin' slams French govt interference

Lawyers for a Muslim couple whose marriage was annulled over the bride's lie about being a virgin rapped the French government on Tuesday for deciding to appeal the ruling.

Both said their clients accepted the ruling and criticized the emotional debate that has raged in France since it was reported last week. A Lille court agreed to end the union because the husband said the marriage was based on a lie.

Justice Minister Rachida Dati defended the ruling last Friday but ordered an appeal on Monday.

The lawyer for the wife said she was furious and did not want a new trial.

"She told me: I refuse this. I don't agree with this appeal," Charles-Edouard Mauger told Europe 1 radio.

"I have to get on with my life," he quoted her as saying. "I don't know who decided that they would think for me. I haven't asked for anything. It feels like I'm hallucinating."

The annulment ruling did not mention the couple's religion. It was accepted by both the man and the woman, a student nurse some 10 years younger than her husband and like him of north African origin.

Muslim stigma

Dati, who comes from a Muslim family and had her own arranged marriage annulled, warned that the case should not be used to stigmatize France's five-million-strong Muslim population.

She made the comment in a stormy parliamentary session on Tuesday in which opposition Socialists booed her for several minutes as she argued the annulment should go before an appeal court but that the ruling was nevertheless legally sound.

"Let's avoid caricature... let's avoid the stigmatization of certain of our compatriots," she said, referring to the country's Muslim population, the largest in Europe.

Critics across the political spectrum -- including other ministers in President Nicolas Sarkozy's government -- have slammed the annulment ruling as a victory for fundamentalists and a blow to the emancipation of women.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon said he would take the Lille case to France's high court of appeal if necessary to prevent creating a legal precedent for annulling a marriage on grounds of virginity.

Case

The annulment was granted in April by a court in the northern city of Lille but news of it reached the French media only last Thursday.

The husband, an engineer in his thirties who has not been named, requested it because he realized his new bride, also a Muslim, was not a virgin on their wedding night in July 2006.

The woman later admitted to him she had had pre-marital sex.

The court granted the request after ruling that the man's belief in the woman's virginity was a "determining factor" in his decision to marry her.

Dati told parliament the case needed to be reexamined in an appeal court because "there must be no ambiguity in the application of the law," which must not "allow the procedure of annulment to be used on the sole grounds of non-virginity."

Under French law, a marriage can be annulled if there has been "an error about the person or the essential qualities of the person." It does not state what the essential qualities are.

Marriages have been annulled for reasons such as impotence, if a partner does not reveal a previous marriage or a child, or if the wife hides the fact that she had been a prostitute.