A “demonstration for the victims” scheduled for Thursday night in Paris has been controversial since the start of the week. The organizers and participants of this meeting are accused of using the tragic murder of the teenager Lola for political purposes, while the parents of the young woman have asked that this drama not be subject to recovery.
The National Rally will not participateOn the other hand, the president of the Reconquista party, Éric Zemmour, called to go there, as well as other far-right personalities. However, it is not them, but the Institute of Justice (IPJ) that is at the origin of this meeting.
This 15-year-old institute is an association “made up of citizens, victims and experts from the legal world mobilized by justice that puts victims at the center,” explains the IPJ website, “its actions are not financed only thanks to its donor members.”
“We, this march, do it for the victims”
The organization works, according to its website, to support victims of crimes or misdemeanors, but above all, according to them, against a certain laxity of justice and the government. “Laxity kills” is his motto, for example. On his site, therefore, there are various proposals to reform the justice system, which aim, for example, at toughening sentences for convicted persons and pointing the finger at remissions of sentences.
There are also testimonies of victims with difficult stories, whose aggressors are mostly “multi-repeat offenders” acquitted or released. Petitions are also proposed, titled for example: “laxity kills, don’t be the next victim” or “yes to the expulsion of foreign criminals”.
During the meeting this Thursday night, “there are victims who are going to speak, who are victims of the group of victims of the Institute of Justice. We have people who have experienced murder, murder, assault, rape, who are never heard and who want to be heard,” he said Wednesday on BFMTV, Pierre-Marie Sève, general delegate of the LEI.
“We, this rally, do it for the victims, it’s called ‘rally for the victims,'” he adds, assuring that the tribute this Thursday night was “planned for several weeks,” and that despite the hashtags “#manifpourLola present in his communication. “Obviously, with the Lola affair, he created a national madness, as other cases have created a national madness,” he adds.
In fact, the association is made up of a group of victims. We also find on their page a list of experts, particularly judicial ones, such as lawyers, magistrates, criminologists and former police officers.
“We are in the intellectual scam”
But the actions of the IPJ are also criticized by members of the same media. “We are in an intellectual fraud. The Institute of Justice sells safe soup,” Matthieu Bonduelle, then general secretary of the magistrates’ union, told Slate in 2011.
That year there was talk of the LEI after the transmission of the testimony of a father whose son was murdered. In the video, the man, very moved, deplores the lack of action by the institutions against the perpetrators of the murder, declaring that “from the first hours of the procedure, justice sided with the murderers.” He then encourages people to sign the LEI petition for “Pact 2012”, that is, for the reform proposals put forward by the association to be included in the promises of the candidates for the 2012 presidential election.
“I signed a set of very vague proposals based on the emotion that this video caused me,” a netizen testified in 2011, explaining that he subscribed because he had touched himself for the father of the victim, but in doing so “I have supported ideas that I did not I can objectively say that I really know; proposals that, in fact, you may not really agree with.
“No one can remain indifferent to the pain of a father. People who sign do so out of emotion. Furthermore, confronting the people with justice is an extremely populist idea. The Institute of Justice plays with fears,” declared Matthieu Bonduelle.
This Thursday night meeting is also accused of kidnapping and using the tragic death of teenager Lola to promote the ideas of the LEI. The far-right personalities involved in it, such as Éric Zemmour, Marion Maréchal or even Florian Philippotthey are also criticized for the same reasons.
An “apolitical” institute?
Along the same lines, by welcoming the extreme right to the demonstration, the IPJ is accused of promoting their ideas, which Pierre-Marie Sève flatly denied on our channel, assuring that “the interests of the institute for justice and Éric Zemmour’s interests are very divergent”. It is a “political but nonpartisan protest,” he reiterated, “the institute of justice is apolitical.”
The LEI is a “movement devoid of any political affiliation,” says the association’s website.
However, on several occasions, the LEI has been singled out for its leaning to the right, even to the extreme right. the obs pointed out in 2011 that its two creators (who are no longer part of the association today), Marie-Laure Jacquemond and her husband Vincent Laarman, were close to conservative structures and had created, for example, SOS-Education, an association considered to be on the right. “We have sympathizers from both the right and the left,” however, the then general delegate, Xavier Bébin, assured the magazine.
In the list of current experts on the IPJ website, we still find several personalities from the right and extreme right, such as magistrate Charles Prats, lawyer Thibault de Montbrial, lawyer Gilles-William Goldnadel or once again the criminologist Xavier Raufer.
And on our antenna, when he lists the parties the LEI has worked with, Pierre-Marie Sève stays to the right of the political spectrum. The Institute was thus “in contact in 2012 with Nicolas Sarkozy’s teams” and “organized a great debate on justice in 2017 with Les Républicains”, he explains. “We worked with whoever wanted” and lately “mainly Reconquista”. For him, above all, “the goal is to get our ideas across.”
This Thursday night, however, the instructions are clear: the IPJ rejects any political recovery and “only the victims and the experts will speak,” the organizing association said on Wednesday. On the other hand, banners and slogans are not allowed.
Source: BFM TV
