Aged 19 to 25, they were on trial for calling hatred against the Asian community on Twitter, during the second confinement last fall.
They are good young people in every way. One dreams of becoming a police officer or magistrate, the other is at Sciences Po or in engineering school … However, they were sentenced this Wednesday to a two-day citizenship course, to be carried out within six months, for calling for hatred against the Asian community on Twitter. A fifth young person was released.
Four minors soon to be tried
On October 28, 2020, as Emmanuel Macron announced a second confinement, hate messages against “the Chinese” and the Asian community in general spread on Twitter. Some are particularly offensive. All are targeting the Chinese community, accused of having a link with the coronavirus.
An investigation demanded by the prosecution makes it possible to lift the anonymity of several accounts that have published hate speech, including that of the four young people sentenced today. Four other people, minors at the time of the facts will be tried later.
None of these young people, aged 19 to 25, have a criminal record. At the hearing in March, they did not deny the facts. Alexis D., 21, a student in an engineering school, explained his gesture by feeling “fed up with the announcement of confinement”.
“I saw that other people had this kind of thing. I stupidly followed the movement without thinking,” he explains.
“Would you have yelled the same words in the street?”, Wanted to know one of the assessors.
“No, because in the street I know that people can hear me and that I can hurt them”, answers the young man in the gray suit.
“Are you a racist sir?”
“Are you a racist, sir?” A civil party lawyer asked him. “No! (…) What I wrote, I do not really mean it, but I now understand the racist character behind these words”, he said.
The lawyers for the civil parties had claimed damages for the associations they represent. Only one lawyer had asked for jail.
The court therefore finally followed the requisitions of the prosecution, condemning them to a citizenship course. Two for “unprofitable provocation to commit a crime or misdemeanor” on the Internet, two others for “public insult on the grounds of origin, ethnicity, race or religion.”
“Between words and deeds, the border is porous and this misguided use of social networks is dangerous,” the prosecutor stressed in her requisitions.
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