They demand more firmness. Two deputies from the macronist group Renaissance presented on Tuesday a bill aimed at closing the “legal loophole” that allows authors of racist or anti-Semitic comments to escape prison sentences.
“To preserve our republican pact and protect our fellow citizens, criminal sanctions must be guaranteed and systematic,” indicates the text co-signed by Mathieu Lefèvre and Caroline Yadan.
The challenge “is to be able to sanction the ideologues who abound on social networks or the Internet, these repeat offenders who rarely attend their hearings and live abroad to escape their convictions,” they write.
“Expanding the power of the court”
The authors of the bill cite in particular the example of far-right essayist Alain Soral, resident in Switzerland, and his sentence in April 2019 to a one-year sentence (reduced on appeal), which was accompanied by an arrest warrant. . in a case challenging crimes against humanity.
The prosecution appealed, considering that the court could not issue such an order for this conviction for a crime provided for in the 1881 law on freedom of the press.
To remedy these types of cases, the bill provides for “expanding the power of the court by giving it the possibility of issuing a preventive detention or detention order to allow the immediate execution of the prison sentence in case of convictions for contested crimes.” against humanity or condoning crimes against humanity or war crimes.”
Crimes transformed into misdemeanors
This measure was defended by Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne, during the presentation, last January, of a plan to fight racism, anti-Semitism and discrimination.
The second of the two articles of the text provides for “transforming into crimes the crimes currently provided for in matters of non-public incitement to discrimination and non-public insult and defamation of a racist and anti-Semitic nature.”
Currently, the difference between “public” insult, a crime that can be punished with prison, and “non-public” insult, which can only be subject to a fine, is “extremely tenuous,” the authors maintain.
“The objective is quite consensual, the idea is to examine this text at the beginning of next year” in the National Assembly, Mathieu Lefèvre, deputy for Val-de-Marne, told AFP.
Source: BFM TV
