Member state France MEPs 3 | Created 2004 | |
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In European elections, Overseas Territories of France is a constituency of the European Parliament. It consists of all the inhabited French overseas departments and collectivities (including the sui generis overseas territory of New Caledonia, but excluding the non-permanently inhabited overseas territories that have no registered voters), even if their territory is not part of the European Union: constitutionally, all French citizens are also granted the same European citizenship, consequently all of them are electing their representants in the European Parliament, independently of their area of residence.
Composition
According to the provisions of Law No. 2007-224 of 21 February 2007:
The Overseas Territories electoral constituency consists of three sections. Each list in this constituency has at least one candidate per section. [A] decree ... shall allocate seats in the constituency between the three sections. The sections are described as follows:
- Atlantic section: the three overseas departments of Guadeloupe, Guyane and Martinique, and the three overseas collectivities of Saint Barthélemy, Saint Martin and Saint Pierre and Miquelon;
- Indian Ocean section: the two overseas departments of Mayotte and Réunion;
- Pacific section: the two overseas collectivities of French Polynesia and Wallis and Futuna, and the special collectivity of New Caledonia.
Those eleven territories have different status with the European Union (none of them are part of the Schengen Area):
The legal currency in those overseas territories is the Euro since 1999 (before it was the French franc), including in OCTs (by special agreement with the European Union) except those in the Pacific section which still use the CFP franc (bound to the Euro by a special agreement between France and the European Union, but with a revokable rate of 8.38 EUR for 1,000 XPF).