International Hotspots

France
An early usage of the term regarding Europe was in a 2002 opinion piece by David
Ignatius in The New York Times, where he wrote about France, "Arab gangs regularly
vandalize synagogues here, the North African suburbs have become no-go zones at
night, and the French continue to shrug their shoulders." La Courneuve, a municipality
(commune) in the Paris region, was described by police as a no-go zone.
In 2010, Raphaël Stainville of French newspaper Le Figaro called certain
neighborhoods of the southern city Perpignan "veritable lawless zones", saying they
had become too dangerous to travel in at night. He added that the same was true in
parts of Béziers and Nîmes. In 2012, Gilles Demailly [fr], the mayor of the French
city Amiens, in the wake of several riots, called the northern part of his city a lawless
zone, where one could no longer order a pizza or call for a doctor. In 2014, Fabrice
Balanche, a scholar of the Middle East, labelled the northern city of Roubaix, as well as
parts of Marseille, "mini-Islamic states", saying that the authority of the state is
completely absent there. American magazines Newsweek and The New Republic have
also used the term to describe parts of France.
In January 2015, after the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris, various American media,
including the news cable channels Fox News and CNN, described the existence of nogo
zones across Europe and in France in particular. In some cases, the French areas
termed "sensitive urban zones" were described as no-go zones. Both networks were
criticized for these statements, and anchors on both networks later apologized for the
characterizations. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, said that she intended to sue Fox
News for its statements.
Germany
A sociology paper published in 2009 said that right-wing extremists had been discussing
the creation of no-go areas in Western Europe since the 1980s. It described attempts to
create "national liberated zones" (national befreite Zonen) in Germany: "'no-go-areas',
which are areas dominated by neo-Nazis," attributing their appeal in the former DDR to
"the unmet promises of modernisation and the poor socio-cultural conditions that offer
no perspectives to young people". Whether or not Germany actually had no-go zones
was disputed: the paper concluded "according to ... state officials, the police and other
relevant institutions, [the phenomenon of no-go zones] does not actually exist ... by
contrast, the national press in Germany, various civic associations, and also experts
acknowledge and give examples of the existence of no-go areas."
In a 2011 interview, Bernhard Witthaut [de], then president of the German police
union Gewerkschaft der Polizei (GdP), stated that in some areas police would always
respond to alerts with more than two officers because of concerns of policemen to
become target of crime themselves. In 2016, Rainer Wendt head of the smaller
Deutsche Polizeigewerkschaft (DPolG) stated that areas exist where police "hardly dare
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