This Thursday, the Lille criminal court sentenced Jean-Paul Delescaut, a local CGT official, to one year in prison for “apology of terrorism”. He was nevertheless acquitted of public incitement to hatred or violence. He was accused of comments written on a leaflet supporting the Palestinians, written collectively but published under his responsibility.
The trade unionist was prosecuted for a leaflet distributed by the union on October 10, three days after the Hamas attack on Israel. “The horrors of the illegal occupation have piled up. Since Saturday [7 octobre] they receive the responses they provoked,” it read in particular.
Not a “real exhortation to hatred”
The court considered that the comments in question demonized the perpetrators of the attacks, incited to “reduce moral reprobation” against them and created an inversion between victims and perpetrators of terrorist acts. The court also emphasized that the leaflet contained “no explicit or implicit condemnation of the actions of October 7.”
While considering that it did not contain any “real exhortation to hatred or violence”, he pointed out that these remarks could have “concrete consequences” in France, where the majority of anti-Semitic acts committed “relate to a displacement of this conflict on the territory [national] “.
Jean-Paul Delescaut was absent for the deliberations and his lawyers did not wish to comment, only indicating that their client was appealing.