This Tuesday, January 2, 2024, in France, a minor appeared before the Nanterre children’s court. He is one of 17 young people arrested last October after uttering anti-Semitic chants in the Paris metro. Aged 16, he was found guilty of public insult on the grounds of religion and ordered to compensate the civil parties before a next hearing next June where he will be notified of his sentence.
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Hand in a pocket of his gray jogging pants, fiddling with his thumb in his mouth, the 16-year-old boy leaves the court. On October 31, he was the oldest of a group of young people who, in the Paris metro, chanted slogans, such as “ We are Nazis, we are proud “.
The scene was filmed and widely reported on social networks. We are three weeks after the Hamas attack and the Israeli response. For his lawyer, Lola Dubois, he did not appreciate the seriousness of his words at that time: “ And I think that it is a child who was made aware of this conflict and who did not necessarily talk about it, who managed it badly and who simply let himself be carried away by a kind of fervor with a group of young men and young women who were absolutely unaware of what they were doing and what they were saying at the time of the events.
“ Probably if these facts had not been filmed, if they had not been broadcast on social networks, probably no one would have denounced them since no one stops them the moment they are heard. », Deplores Ilanit Chiche, lawyer for one of the civil parties, satisfied with the decision and who expects a certain firmness from justice regarding the young boy’s sentence.
The other members of the group, who do not live in the same department, will appear in May.
To read “Nothing can justify hatred”: in France, more than 182,000 people march against anti-Semitism