Le Pen trial: French far-right leader acquitted on hate speech charges

A French court on Tuesday acquitted far-right leader and presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen on charges she broke hate speech laws by tweeting pictures of Islamic State atrocities.

Published: 4 May 2021 15:47 CEST

Le Pen trial: French far-right leader acquitted on hate speech charges

Marine Le Pen. Photo: Bertrand Guay/AFP

Le Pen shared the gruesome images in December 2015, a few weeks after Islamic State jihadists killed 130 people in attacks in Paris, in response to a journalist who she accused of drawing a comparison between IS and her party.

One of the pictures showed the body of James Foley, an American journalist beheaded by the Islamist militants.

Another showed a man in an orange jumpsuit being run over by a tank, and the third a Jordanian pilot being burned alive in a cage.

“Daesh is this!” Le Pen wrote in a caption, using an Arabic acronym for IS.

In 2018 a judge charged her, as well as her Rassemblement National (National Rally) party colleague Gilbert Collard who also tweeted the pictures, with circulating “violent messages that incite terrorism or pornography or seriously harm human dignity” and that can be viewed by a minor.

The crime is punishable by up to three years in prison and a fine of €75,000, but the prosecution sought only a €5,000 fine.

The court acquitted both Le Pen and Collard on Tuesday, citing the right to freedom of expression.

The court recognised Le Pen’s intention to inform by sharing the images and said doing so can contribute to public debate, as long as violence is not normalised.

“It’s a great victory for law because freedom of expression was at stake in this case,” Le Pen’s lawyer Rodolphe Bosselut told reporters.

“Freedom of expression has been recognised as complete for a top politician,” he added.

The verdict comes as opinion polls show Le Pen will likely face off again against President Emmanuel Macron in next year’s presidential contest, in a repeat of the run-off seen in the last presidential elections in 2017.

Member comments

Anonymous - 5 May 2021 at 07:59 CEST

How she slithered away from this is beyond belief. It makes one wonder what the politics of the “court” were.
Anonymous - 5 May 2021 at 09:05 CEST

I don’t like Marine le Pen, but I support freedom of speech.
The pictures she posted on twitter were gruesome, I agree, however I feel it’s a good thing for people to see the atrocities caused by IS.
You could turn away and not look if you prefer, that’s your choice.

Become a Member to leave a comment.

On Wednesday, Bardella was confronted on live television with a sound recording of RN MP Daniel Grenon saying that anybody of French-North African double nationality “has no place in high office”.

Bardella quickly condemned the remark, calling it “abject”, and announced the creation of a “conflict committee” within the party to deal with such cases.

“Anybody who says things that are not in line with my convictions will be excluded,” he said.

Earlier Laurent Gnaedig, a parliamentary candidate for the RN, caused uproar by saying that remarks by party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, who called Nazi gas chambers “a detail of history”, were not actually anti-Semitic.

Gnaedig later presented his “sincere apologies” and said he had never meant to question the reality of “the horror of the Holocaust”. He would accept any decision by the party’s conflict commission, he added.

In November, Bardella himself got into hot water on the same topic when he said he did “not believe that Jean-Marie Le Pen was an anti-Semite”. He later walked back the remark, saying Le Pen “obviously withdrew into a kind of anti-Semitism”.

Another candidate, Ludivine Daoudi, dropped out of the race for France’s parliament on Tuesday after a photo of her allegedly wearing a cap from Nazi Germany’s air force, the Luftwaffe, sparked furore online.

And Brittany region candidate Francoise Billaud deleted her Facebook account after she was found to have shared a picture of the grave of French Vichy collaborationist leader Philippe Pétain with the caption “Marshal of France”.

RN deputy Roger Chudeau meanwhile got into trouble with the party leadership for saying that the 2014 appointment of Moroccan-born Najat Vallaud-Belkacem as the Socialist government’s education minister had been “an error”.

Marine Le Pen has over the past years moved to make the party a mainstream force and distance it from the legacy of Jean Marie Le Pen, her father and its co-founder, in a process widely dubbed “dédiabolisation” (un-demonization).

“What really matters is how a political party reacts”, she has said, adding that the party commission’s would be “harsh” in dealing with such cases of extremism.

She added there was a distinction to be made between “inadmissible” statements for which sanctions were “highly likely”, and cases of mere “clumsiness”.

The latter category, she said, included an attempt by candidate Paule Veyre de Soras to defend her party against racism charges by saying that: “I have a Jewish ophthalmologist and a Muslim dentist”.

Le Pen said most candidates “are decent people who are in the running because the National Assembly needs to reflect France and not reflect Sciences Po or ENA”, two elite universities.

The RN has acknowledged that President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to call a snap election left little time to select candidates in the numbers needed to fill the seats it expects to win.

The far right has also noted that other parties have similar problems, citing the case of hard-left National Assembly candidate Raphael Arnault, who was found to be on a French police anti-extremist watchlist.

Arnault was suspected of terrorist sympathies and questioned after tweeting on October 7th that “the Palestinian resistance has launched an unprecedented attack on the colonialist state of Israel”.

A recent poll by Harris Interactive projected the RN and its allies would win 190 to 220 seats in the National Assembly, the leftist coalition NFP 159 to 183 seats and Macron’s Ensemble (Together) alliance 110 to 135.

You can follow all the latest election news HERE or sign up to receive by email our bi-weekly election breakdown