Steeve Briois and two union officials, who were convicted of “racist hatred”, were acquitted.

2024-09-04 11:02:29

Steeve Briois, mayor (National Rally) of Hénin-Beaumont (Pas-de-Calais), and Marine Le Pen, deputy RN for Pas-de-Calais, during the legislative election campaign, in Hénin-Beaumont, June 14 2024. SARAH MEYSSONNIER / REUTERS

Steeve Briois, leader of the National Rally (RN) of Hénin-Beaumont since 2014, and close to Marine Le Pen, and two other leaders of the National Front (FN, former name of the RN) were released on Tuesday September 3 ., by the Nanterre court, where they were sentenced on June 18 for “outrage of racial hatred”. They have been sued by nine human rights groups, led by the Maison des Potes – Maison de l’Égalité, for the publication, in September 2013, of “Minimum practice guidelines for elected officials in the National – language”, on the eve of the 2014 municipal election.

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Steeve Briois, then secretary general of the party, preceded it by explaining that the candidates must “protect the national interest (for example, in the allocation of social housing)”. The parties have decided to take the case to court “National Favorite”, new formulation of this central element of the far-right third party’s system, but the court focused on a hard reading of the process and did not consider the question in any way.

The guide, distributed to the media, disappeared quickly from the FN website, but Marie-Thérèse Costa-Fesenbeck, at the time the representative of the party in Pyrénées-Orientales, shared it in November 2013 on the third website in the department, m66. fr. , is now closed. The court remembers that the publication on a site is subject to the law of July 29, 1982 on audio communication, and its legal manager is the director of the publication, the authors, according to the law on the press, are only collaborators. However, the name of the publisher “does not analyze during the tutorial”note the judgment, which notes in veiled words that the study of the file is incomplete. The site of the Pyrénées-Orientales federation has no legal entity, so it is a natural person who is the director of the press, who puts it online.

Personal initiative

The domain name was registered on January 11, 2012 with the company OVH: “It is clear that there is no request to the said company to know the name of the person who reserves the domain name and who is responsible for paying for the server rent”indicate the judges strongly. Additional information would be useless, the site has been closed for years…

In the absence of a publishing director, however it is possible to pursue partners, that is to say Steeve Briois, author of the previous, and Sophie Montel, editor of the guide – it has opened the door of the party in 2017 after spending twenty years there. But, the court recalled, “However, it must be shown that the defendants knew that these comments were intended to be published on the site m66.fr”it is in fact the moral element that establishes complicity. And as the publication of the guide is the personal initiative of Perpignan resident Marie-Thérèse Costa-Fesenbeck, “The absence of sufficient evidence for the personal and voluntary participation of Steeve Briois and Sophie Montel”they were released.