French Court Acquits Marine Le Pen of Hate Speech
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Version 0 of 1. PARIS — A French court on Tuesday acquitted the far-right leader Marine Le Pen of charges that she incited religious hatred against Muslims with comments made in 2010. Ms. Le Pen, now the president of the National Front party, was on trial for comparing Muslims praying in the street to the German occupation of France during World War II at a rally in Lyon, comments that prompted anti-racism and Muslim-rights groups to file complaints. She was facing a fine of 45,000 euros, or about $50,000, and a sentence of up to a year in prison. But judges in Lyon, in southeastern France, followed the state prosecutor’s recommendation that Ms. Le Pen be acquitted of charges of “inciting discrimination, violence or hatred toward a group of people based on their religious beliefs.” During the trial held in October, the state prosecutor, Bernard Reynaud, argued that Ms. Le Pen was only exercising her right to free speech because she was not targeting all Muslims in France, only a portion of them. Ms. Le Pen reacted to the ruling with a post on her official Twitter account. “Five years of aspersions, one acquittal… And now how many slanderers will apologize?” she wrote. Ms. Le Pen was campaigning for control of the National Front when she made the comments about Muslims praying in the streets, which was mostly the result of insufficient mosque space, at the 2010 rally in Lyon. “If you want to talk about the occupation, let’s talk about that, by the way, because here we are talking about the occupation of our space,” she said during the rally. “It’s an occupation of entire stretches of territory, of neighborhoods where religious law is applied. This is an occupation. Sure, there are no armored vehicles, no soldiers, but it’s still an occupation, and it weighs on the inhabitants.” Ms. Le Pen ultimately won the National Front’s presidency, and has striven ever since to shed the party’s anti-Semitic and racist legacy left by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, one of its founders. The party expelled Mr. Le Pen in August. The National Front failed to win any contests in the second and final round of regional elections held on Sunday, but its anti-immigrant, anti-European Union and anti-Muslim positions have still garnered strong support from a segment of the French electorate. Ms. Le Pen used the trial, held just six weeks before the first round of the elections, as a platform to defend those positions, describing her 2010 comments as an “exhortation to respect the law” on behalf of “those who have been abandoned, the forgotten ones.” Matthieu Hénon, a lawyer for the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship between Peoples, one of the groups that filed a complaint, said by telephone that he was surprised by the court’s ruling Tuesday. “The court’s reasoning was that Marine Le Pen’s comments did not target the Muslim community as a whole,” Mr. Hénon said. “But we believe that comparing the German occupation with Muslims who are forced to pray in the street incites fear, incites hatred.” The Collective Against Islamophobia in France, another group that had filed a complaint against Ms. Le Pen, said in a statement that it was studying the ruling and considering its next steps. The plaintiffs have 10 days to appeal the judges’ decision. “This acquittal shows, once again, the legitimization and normalization of Islamophobia and of the hate speech that conveys it,” the organization said in the statement. |