Alpha Mummy: Are the French trying a sneaky classroom mobile ban?

Mobile telephones are to be banned from French primary schools, and operators must offer handsets that allow only text messages, under government measures to reduce the health risk to children.

Companies will also be required to supply phones that work only with headsets, to limit the danger to the brain from electromagnetic radiation, Rosalyne Bachelot, the Health Minister, said.

The measures, which emerged from a six-week review of mobile phone and wi-fi radiation, have been attacked as inadequate by campaigners who accuse the State of playing down dangers from phones and transmitter masts. The campaign groups, which walked out on the government consultation on Monday, wanted a ban on mobile use by children under 14 and drastic measures to limit the power and location of masts.

The Government refused to act against masts, citing the absence of any evidence that they affected human or animal health. Experiments are to be carried out in three cities to test the feasibility of reducing the power of transmissions.

The Government will limit children’s use of mobile phones pending the results of international and French studies in the autumn. The Education Ministry is to issue a decree on the primary school ban. At the moment most French schools bar the use of mobile phones only in classrooms. The Government and telephone operators have been thrown on the defensive by hundreds of groups around the country that are demanding the removal of phone masts near schools, hospitals and homes.

Radiation is commonly blamed for insomnia, headaches, fatigue and cancer. Libraries and other public spaces in several cities have switched off wi-fi internet after reports that the radio waves were harmful.

The operators are especially alarmed by court orders to remove phone transmitters, despite the absence of evidence that they cause harm. The appeal court in Versailles shocked the industry in February when it ordered Bouygues, one of the three French operators, to dismantle a mast at Tassin la Demi-Lune near Lyons because families there feared for their health. The judges acknowledged that there was no existing evidence of a threat but there was no guarantee that a risk did not exist. The “feeling of anxiety” of the inhabitants was therefore justified, they said.

Their reasoning is known as the “principle of precaution”, a doctrine proclaimed by the Socialist Government in the 1990s as an argument for refusing to import British beef after it had been declared safe. The principle, which is also behind France’s rejection of genetically modified crops, is deplored by scientists and ministers in President Sarkozy’s Government as a brake on innovation.

Martin Bouygues, whose family owns the telephone operator, said that the State must decide “whether it wants mobile telephones or not”. Fear of unproven dangers risks taking France back to the Middle Ages, Jean de Kervasdoué, a former national director of French hospitals, said. “It’s dangerous thinking . . . like the medieval inquisitors who demanded that heretics prove their innocence. You cannot always prove your innocence.”

Times Recommends

• The flame that was snuffed out by freedom
• The liberation of Jackie O
• Jon Bon Jovi Inc