The administrative court of Nice on Saturday suspended in the name of freedom of assembly and expression a municipal decree issued to prohibit the arrival on Sunday of the controversial Islamologist Tariq Ramadan, expected to animate a “literary lunch” there.
Joining the arguments of the defense of Tariq Ramadan, the court considers that this decree “carries a serious and manifestly illegal attack on the freedom of assembly and expression” and condemns the municipality to pay 500 euros to Ramadan, according to a decision obtained by the AFP.
The city of Nice, led by Christian Estrosi (Horizons), had in particular invoked a “risk of disturbing public order”, highlighting the possibility that a collective of feminist associations would come to demonstrate.
Literary lunch
A contested figure and the declining influence of European Islam, just acquitted in a rape case in Switzerland, Tariq Ramadan is to host a “literary lunch” on Sunday in a restaurant in Nice, to which nearly 80 people have registered. The place is kept secret and participants will only receive two hours before the meeting place for an exchange around The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho followed by a “meditative reflection”.
According to Me Sefen Guez Guez, who pleaded the cause of Ramadan during the hearing on Saturday, his client has hosted 19 literary lunches of this type for two years in France. After that of Nice, another is planned in the Paris region on June 18.
Suspected of rape in France
At the end of May, Tariq Ramadan was acquitted of the charge of rape and sexual coercion by a Geneva court which ruled that there was no evidence against him in this case dating back to 2008. It was the first rape trial against 60-year-old Tariq Ramadan. He is threatened with a trial in France for similar facts.
In 2016, the administrative court of Nice had already rejected the request of an elected representative of the National Front who requested the banning of one of his conferences in Carros (Alpes-Maritimes).
Doctor of the University of Geneva, where he wrote a thesis on the founder of the Egyptian Islamist brotherhood of the Muslim Brotherhood who was his grandfather, Tariq Ramadan was professor of contemporary Islamic studies at the University of Oxford, UK.
In France, he is suspected of rape committed between 2009 and 2016 on four women, a case which triggered his fall in 2017. The Paris prosecutor’s office requested his referral to an assize court in July and it is up to the judges of instruction to order a trial or not.