A French court has convicted Éric Zemmour, candidate for the presidency of France, of “racist hate speech”. According to information from The Guardian, the journalist will have to pay 10 thousand euros for having said in 2020 that unaccompanied immigrant children were “thieves, murderers, they are rapists. That’s all they are. We must send them back.”
Zemmour’s lawyer said he would appeal the decision. Also according to the Guardian, Zemmour, who did not appear during the trial or during the announcement of the sentence, had declared that the process was an attempt to “intimidate” and that he would not “shut up”.
Zemmour had already been convicted twice on the same charge: in 2011, he was fined 10,000 euros after claiming that “most traffickers are black and Arabs” and in 2018, 3,000 euros for comments in which he pointed out an “invasion ” Muslim in France.
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