If the violent nature of the images is not contested, the court did not find any proselytism in the messages posted on Twitter by Marine Le Pen and Gilbert Collard in 2015.
The Nanterre court on Tuesday released Marine Le Pen and Gilbert Collard in the case of photos of Daesh abuses published in 2015 on social networks. If the violent nature of the images is not disputed, the judges did not find any proselytism in the messages posted on Twitter by the two elected members of the National Gathering, shortly after the trauma of the Paris attacks.
On December 16, 2015, Marine Le Pen relayed three photos of abuses by the jihadist group. She added the words: “Daesh, that’s it!”, In response to journalist Jean-Jacques Bourdin whom she accused of having “compared” the terrorist group and the National Front during a program. Gilbert Collard, then deputy of Gard, had relayed the same day on his Facebook and Twitter accounts the photo of a man lying on the ground, his skull smashed, with this comment: “Bourdin compares the FN to Daesh: the weight of words and the shock of sores! “.
“A great victory for the law”
At the bar on February 10, the president of the RN defended herself by invoking her “freedom of expression and information”. She denounced a “political trial” against her movement, her lawyer, Me Rodolphe Bosselut, criticizing a “prosecution whatever the cost, it is ‘Marine at all costs’: it had to be pursued at all costs”. For his part, Gilbert Collard affirmed that the dissemination of these photos was “not detrimental to human dignity. If tomorrow I find myself facing an idiot who denies the existence of the Shoah, I cannot show him anything. photo of a concentration camp? ”he compared before the judge.
This Tuesday, the court considered that the dissemination of these images constituted a “coherent” response from Marine Le Pen to “a controversial attack”. In addition, the judges considered that the diffusion did not take on “any proselytizing character since the images were accompanied by comments” written by the elected officials who did not thus “trivialize” or “present the violence in a favorable light”.
The court therefore released the two defendants, to the great satisfaction of their lawyers, present at the deliberation. “It is a great victory for the law because freedom of expression was at stake in this file, this freedom of expression was recognized as total for a first rank political leader”, declared to the press Rodolphe Bosselut, advice from Marine Le Pen.
