2023-05-18 02:53:33
It is always necessary to remember, in a criminal court, that the “media court” and that of social networks are not the judicial court. That the former often flout the cardinal principles which found the latter. That the risk exists, and must be fought, of seeing the second bow, out of conformity or fear of displeasing, to the injunctions of the first.
On rising, Wednesday, May 17, to plead the acquittal of Tariq Ramadan before the Geneva Criminal Court which judges him for “rape” and “sexual coercion”, Me Yaël Hayat was right to point out all of this. Just as she was right to warn judges against “sacredness of the voice of the victims. » But his tempestuous pleading, evoking the ghosts of Voltaire and Victor Hugo, seemed to have been written for a trial other than the one we attended. Like a shifted soundtrack of images.
At the opening of the proceedings, two days earlier, the defendant’s defense had led the offensive against the inclusion in the prosecution file of extracts from the minutes from the rape proceedings brought against him in France. Me Yaël Hayat and M.e Guerric Canonica demanded their withdrawal, on the grounds that these documents “truncated, chosen” – these are mainly the depositions of two French plaintiffs – were “exclusively dependent” and violated the principle of fair trial. Their request was rejected by the court.
The defense argument was relevant. The admission of these documents could in fact give the unfortunate impression that the prosecution felt the need to support the complaint submitted to the assessment of the Geneva court and that it was going to draw, from the words of the other complainants, enough to reinforce that of the Swiss civil party.
Tariq Ramadan would be the victim of a kind of conspiracy
The denunciation, by his lawyers, of this strategy of communicating vessels, prepared the ground for one of the major arguments that Tariq Ramadan opposes to his indictment: he would be the victim of a kind of conspiracy – of “trap”, he says – formed by the alliance of women disappointed to have been rejected or hurt by his infidelity and his “ideological adversaries” determined to bring him down. In would testify, according to him, the ” copy and paste ” statements from his accusers.
Except that the hearing did not go as Tariq Ramadan and his lawyers had announced. The depositions of the French plaintiffs were almost absent from the debates. The court did not mention them when questioning the defendant. Prosecutor Adrian Holloway did not say a word about it in his indictment, delivered on Tuesday, May 16, in support of his request for the conviction and sentencing of Tariq Ramadan to three years in prison, eighteen of which are suspended. .
You have 54.1% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
1684387069
#apply #law #acquit #pleads #defense