A preliminary investigation was opened on Tuesday April 12 in Paris after the complaint of two associations on a canvassing by SMS from the party of Éric Zemmour targeting French voters of the Jewish faith on the eve of the first round of the presidential election.
The SMS was sent the day before the first round of the presidential election to many mobile phones in France. Signed with the name of Eric Zemmour, it referred to a page published by the Reconquest party! displaying a text explicitly addressed to French Jews.
The far-right polemicist, who won 7% of the vote on Sunday, presented himself as ” the only one to denounce the expansion of Islam which is ravaging our country “. ” The anti-Semitism that kills today is Islamic “, also affirmed the text, now offline.
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Following a complaint from the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF) and the association J’accuse AIPJ, the prosecution announced on Tuesday the opening of an investigation for “ possession, storage, recording, transmission of personal data outside the cases provided for by law, communication to a third party without authorization and misuse of the purposes of a personal data file”.
The investigations were entrusted to the Brigade for the repression of personal crime (BRDP). The criminal code punishes by five years’ imprisonment and a fine of 300,000 euros the creation of a file revealing religious beliefs or racial or ethnic origins without the consent of the person concerned.
Investigation already opened at the CNIL
The National Commission for Computing and Liberties (Cnil) had already opened an investigation following this canvassing. The CNIL stipulates that ” the processing of personal data which reveals (…) religious beliefs ” is ” forbidden “, unless ” the data subject has given explicit consent to the processing of such personal data for one or more specific purposes “.
Asked by BFMTV, Éric Zemmour’s team had confirmed that they were behind the sending campaign ” of ten thousand text messages which linked to the candidate’s web page. One of the leaders of the Reconquest! had assured the news channel that this political canvassing had been set up with the help of a personal data broker, who buys databases to trade in them.
Three other associations, the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (Licra), SOS Racisme and Mrap (Movement against racism and for friendship between peoples), also announced to AFP that they had filed a complaint on Tuesday with from the Paris prosecutor’s office.
(With AFP)