Jean-Marie Le Pen relaxed after his comments on Patrick Bruel and the “batch” – The HuffPost

Philippe Wojazer via Reuters

JUSTICE – Legal victory for Jean-Marie Le Pen. The Paris Criminal Court released this Friday, October 29, the former president of the National Front (FN, former National Rally), who was tried for incitement to racial hatred, seven years after his sentence on the “batch” which had aroused an outcry.

While his interlocutor advanced the name of the singer to him Patrick bruel, of Jewish origin, Jean-Marie Le Pen, now 93 years old, commented with a laugh: ”It doesn’t surprise me. Listen, we’ll do a batch next time! ”

The 93-year-old former presidential candidate was not present at the judgment. But Jean-Marie Le Pen immediately told AFP: “The facts won out over the malevolence. I am delighted that in this case which was obvious the court ruled according to the law ”.

At trial, the prosecution did not submit requisitions, relying on the court’s judgment. For the prosecutor, “the use of the term ‘batch’ was absolutely nothing innocent” and constitutes a “serious moral fault”.

Those words had sparked condemnation and sowed discord within his own party. Her daughter Marine Le Pen, then president of the FN, had described “a political fault”. The party’s co-founder was excluded from the movement in the summer of 2015, before being stripped of his honorary presidency at the March 2018 congress.

Le Pen sentenced for other controversial statements

At the end of a long process of withdrawing his parliamentary immunity, Jean-Marie Le Pen was tried, as was Jean-François Jalkh, prosecuted as director of publication of the FN website and also released.

In a letter sent to the court for the hearing on September 1, Jean-Marie Le Pen had again maintained that the word “batch” had “never had a controversial or even political meaning”. The defendants’ lawyers had pleaded for acquittal, seeing in this case “an interpretation gone crazy of a term as innocuous, banal”, according to Me David Dassa-Le Deist, lawyer for Mr. Jalkh.

Lawyer for the National Office for Vigilance Against Antisemitism (BNVCA), Me Marc Bensimhon, protested, ironically: “Of course, it has nothing to do with crematoria … who are we kidding? ? ”. The BNVCA was a civil party to the lawsuit, alongside SOS Racisme and the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (Licra).

The former presidential candidate has already been the subject of multiple judicial convictions, in particular for “contesting a crime against humanity”, when he had qualified the gas chambers of “point of detail of the history of the Second World War”.

In 1993, he was fined for his 1988 pun, “Durafour crematorium”, aimed at the then civil service minister, Michel Durafour.

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