The Court of Cassation on Wednesday rejected appeals filed by Swiss Islamologist Tariq Ramadan, making definitive his referral to trial for aggravated rape and rape of three women between 2009 and 2016, AFP learned from a judicial source. Tariq Ramadan contested the accusations in these appeals. At the end of a hearing Wednesday morning, the highest French judicial court refused them. He will therefore be judged by the Paris departmental criminal court in this emblematic investigation of the #MeToo era that began at the end of 2017.
On June 27, the Paris Court of Appeal ordered a trial for Tariq Ramadan for aggravated rape of a woman and two rapes of two others. The Islamologist and a fourth woman, Mounia Rabbouj, had filed opposing appeals, the first requesting a general dismissal of the case, the second the addition of her accusations rejected by the court of appeal.
Six years of investigation
At Wednesday’s hearing, both the rapporteur and the advocate general advocated the non-admission of these appeals, a procedure which allows non-serious or inadmissible appeals to be quickly dismissed. The two magistrates notably considered that these requests tended to call into question the substantive assessment of the investigating chamber, while the role of the Court of Cassation is limited to verifying the absence of an error of law.
No lawyer, in defense of Tariq Ramadan or in support of Mounia Rabbouj, defended his written observations orally. On July 7, 2023, after six years of investigation, two investigating judges ordered the dismissal of Tariq Ramadan for rapes of Christelle (not her real name), Henda Ayari, Mounia Rabbouj and a fourth woman.
The case of Mounia Rabbouj dismissed
In its judgment of June 27, of which AFP was informed, the court of appeal had dismissed the case of Mounia Rabbouj, and took the opposite view on the merits of the investigating magistrates and the investigation, which had focused on the influence, by retaining violence as the main stratagem of the rapes attributed to Ramadan.
In this highly publicized and emblematic procedure of the #MeToo era, the complainants described particularly brutal sexual relations. The story of Mounia Rabbouj, who presented a dress stained with the Islamologist’s semen, forced the intellectual, who had initially denied it, to admit in mid-2018 the existence of adulterous relations with her and former mistresses, marked by “domination”, rough but “consented”, a major turning point in this issue.
In Switzerland, the preacher was sentenced at the end of August to three years in prison, including one year, for rape and sexual coercion in 2008. His lawyers appealed to the Swiss Federal Court, the supreme court of the Confederation.
