Éric Zemmour will be retried. The Court of Cassation on Tuesday canceled his release pronounced in September 2021 for his very virulent speech against Islam and immigration delivered in 2019 during a political meeting called “convention of the right”.
The highest court of the judiciary ordered a new trial before the Paris Court of Appeal for the former presidential candidate who will be retried for public insults and incitement to racial hatred. “We will face the new hearing,” said his lawyer, Me Olivier Pardo.
“Street Islamization”
During a convention of the right organized by relatives of the former deputy of the National Front (now RN) Marion Maréchal on September 28, 2019, Éric Zemmour had delivered a speech castigating “colonizing” immigrants and an “Islamization of the Street “. The chronicler had also described the veil and the djellaba as “the uniforms of an army of occupation”.
At first instance, the Paris Criminal Court considered that these remarks constituted “an exhortation, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, to discrimination and hatred against the Muslim community and its religion” and condemned Éric Zemmour to 10,000 euro fine.
“A Lesson in Law”
The Court of Appeal had, on September 8, 2021, reversed this judgment and acquitted the polemicist, a decision against which the general prosecutor’s office and anti-racist associations as civil parties had appealed.
The appeal judges concluded that none of the contentious remarks prosecuted targeted “all Africans, immigrants or Muslims, but only a fraction of these groups”, recalls the Court of Cassation in its judgment. “The contentious remarks refer to immigrants of the Muslim faith coming from Africa, that is to say a group of people determined both by their origin and by their religion, falling within the provisions of the law”, slice the high court, which therefore cancels the release.
“The Court of Cassation gives a real lesson in law to Éric Zemmour. She was not fooled by the truncated presentation of her remarks which had misled the Court of Appeal. The intervention of the polemicist during the convention of the right must be considered globally and not in pieces, ”reacted Me Patrice Spinosi, lawyer for MRAP.