Anti-Islamophobia activist says Poland deported him at France’s request

BIRMINGHAM, England (AA) – UK-based advocacy group CAGE’s Managing Director Muhammad Rabbani was denied entry into Poland, where he was to speak at a conference, at France’s request.

In a statement, CAGE said that Rabbani was due to deliver “another critical speech against France’s state-sponsored Islamophobia, as he had done last year,” at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Human Dimension Conference.

“On that occasion, he was banned from France only a month after delivering a speech on France’s systematic persecution of Muslims,” the statement said

CAGE accused France of continuing its “relentless pursuit of Muhammad Rabbani, a human rights defender, this time extending its reach to Poland by abusing international information sharing between states to silence dissent.”

The rights group said the sequence of events targeting CAGE underscores France’s “discomfort with public scrutiny of its policies that target Muslim communities.”

“It represents a blatant attack on freedom of expression and undermines the credibility of the OSCE as a platform for human rights and dialogue. It also undermines Poland’s historic struggle to escape totalitarianism which plagued the country during the Soviet era and its credentials as a liberal democracy,” the group said.

Commenting on his forced return to the UK, Rabbani said: “France attempted to prevent CAGE from bringing public awareness at the international level regarding France’s systematic persecution of Muslims.

“However, France has not achieved its objectives as my colleagues from CAGE are at the conference and have been joined by a number of delegates from various European countries representing Muslim civil society. We will not be silenced,” he said.

The advocacy group will legally be challenging France to overturn the ban on Rabbani.