Steeve Briois, the Rassemblement National (RN) mayor of Hénin-Beaumont since 2014, and close to Marine Le Pen, as well as two other executives of the Front National (FN, the former name of the RN) were acquitted on Tuesday, September 3, by the Nanterre court, where they had been tried on June 18 for “incitement to racial hatred”. They were prosecuted by nine human rights associations, led by the Maison des potes – Maison de l’égalité, for having published, in September 2013, a “Petit guide pratique de l’élué municipal Front National” (Small practical guide for the elected municipal Front National), on the eve of the 2014 municipal elections.
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Steeve Briois, then secretary general of the party, had prefaced it by explaining that the candidates had to “defend national priority (for example, in the allocation of social housing)”The associations intended to put the trial of the “national preference”, the new formulation of this central element of the far-right party’s programme, but the court adhered to a rigorous reading of the procedure and did not consider the issue in any way.
The guide, distributed to the media, quickly disappeared from the FN website, but Marie-Thérèse Costa-Fesenbeck, at the time the party’s delegate in the Pyrénées-Orientales, had published it in November 2013 on the party’s website in the department, m66.fr, which is now closed. The court recalled that publication on a website was covered by the law of 29 July 1982 on audiovisual communication, and that its legal representative was the director of publication, the authors, as in the press law, being only accomplices. However, the name of the director of publication “was not analyzed during the investigation”considers the judgment, which considers in veiled terms that the investigation of the case was very deficient. The site of the federation of the Pyrénées-Orientales does not have a legal entity, it is therefore a natural person who is the publication director, the one who put it online.
Personal initiative
The domain name was reserved on January 11, 2012 with the company OVH: “It must be noted that no request was sent to the said company to find out the name of the person who reserved the domain name and who is responsible for paying the server rental.”the judges state sternly. Further information would be useless, the site has been closed for years…
In the absence of a publication director, it is however possible to prosecute the accomplices, that is to say Steeve Briois, author of the preface, and Sophie Montel, editor of the guide – she has since slammed the door of the party in 2017 after having spent twenty years there. But, the court recalls, “However, it must be demonstrated that the defendants knew that these comments were intended to be published on the website m66.fr”it is indeed the moral element that establishes complicity. And as the publication of the guide was a personal initiative of Perpignan resident Marie-Thérèse Costa-Fesenbeck, “due to lack of sufficient proof of the personal and voluntary participation of Steeve Briois and Sophie Montel”they were released.
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