Jean-Marie Le Pen and justice, episode 5842. On November 9, the Court of Appeal examined an appeal filed by three anti-racist associations against the former president of the National Front (FN, now National Rally), for incitement to racial hatred against several personalities in remarks made in 2014. As in the first instance, the former presidential candidate was acquitted, the court of appeal finding that he had not committed any civil fault.
In a video then posted on his blog, Jean-Marie Le Pen, now 94 years old, then MEP, attacked artists committed against the FN like Guy Bedos, Madonna or Yannick Noah. While his interlocutor advanced him the name of Patrick Bruel, Jean-Marie Le Pen had commented with a laugh: “It does not surprise me. Listen, we’ll make a batch next time.
A reference to “the genocide of the Jews” for SOS Racisme
On November 9, Me Sahand Saber, on behalf of the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (Licra), a civil party, pleaded that the comments of the former leader of the FN against a singer of religion Jew had “an inherently anti-Semitic and racist significance”. His colleague Marie Mercier, counsel for SOS Racisme, also a civil party, felt that by targeting Patrick Bruel, “it is the Jewish community as a whole that is targeted”. “Fournée refers to oven which refers to the genocide of the Jews,” she pleaded.
The representative of the public prosecutor’s office, who had not appealed after the release of the former presidential candidate, had recognized that “the words (incriminated) are not innocent in the mouth” of Jean-Marie Le Pen , but judged that “they cannot be the subject of a conviction”. Jean-Marie Le Pen absent at the hearing, his lawyer Me Frédéric Joachim had meanwhile denounced “the nonsense of the procedure”, qualifying in passing the civil parties as “scavengers” and “vultures” against “d ‘a 94-year-old man’.