French justice minister to get tough on young crooks

PARIS (Reuters) - New French Justice Minister Rachida Dati visited young offenders in jail on Saturday and promised to crack down on juvenile crime.

"We will be uncompromising on youth delinquency. There will no longer be the laxity that has reigned for so long," she told staff at Fleury-Merogis prison in the Paris region.

Dati, 41, is no stranger to the prison, one of France's largest. She was a regular visitor when she worked as a judge in nearby Evry, just south of Paris.

Concern over crime was a key battleground in the election and President Nicolas Sarkozy was keen to portray himself as taking a tough stance on the issue.

Dati was Sarkozy's spokeswomen during the election campaign but was not previously well known by the French public.

The daughter of a Moroccan bricklayer and an illiterate Algerian house wife, Dati was born in a housing estate in Saint-Remy in eastern France as the second of 12 children.

She trained as a magistrate from 1997-1999 and was drafted by Sarkozy into his interior ministry in 2002, where she worked on his crime prevention initiative and played point-person for his often fraught relations with France's volatile suburbs.