Thousands of protesters gathered in a number of French cities and Israel on Sunday to denounce a courtroom’s refusal of a trial for a person who killed a 65-year-old Jewish lady, after specialists decided he acted in a “delirious match” due to heavy marijuana use.
The decision infuriated the victim’s family as well as Jewish groups, and prompted President Emmanuel Macron to urge a change in French law to ensure people face responsibility for violent crimes while under the influence of drugs.
Sarah Halimi was pushed out the window of her Paris flat by neighbour Kobili Traore, 27, who shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is best).
The nation’s highest courtroom stated this month that whereas the homicide was anti-Semitic, Traore couldn’t be held criminally accountable since he had acted in a state of dementia.
He has been in psychiatric care since Halimi’s dying.
“The clamour has risen and hope has returned. That hope is all of you right here,” Halimi’s brother William Attal told a crowd of several thousand at the Trocadero esplanade in Paris.
The MP who leads Macron’s Republic on the Move party, Christophe Castaner, addressed the protest, which was also attended by opposition leaders and by several well-known actors.
Former French first lady Carla Bruni, wife of Nicolas Sarkozy, also appeared at the Paris rally, as did Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who said the city would soon name a street in Halimi’s memory.
“It will also be a way of doing her justice,” Hidalgo stated.
– ‘Ashamed’ –
Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti confirmed Sunday {that a} new penal accountability legislation could be introduced by finish May to fill a “authorized void”.
But France’s CSM judiciary council rejected the government’s “disparagement” on Sunday and insisted that judges had accurately utilized the legislation in a “painful” case.
More than 20,000 people demonstrated in Paris, and up to 2,000 took part in a march in the Mediterranean city of Marseille, police said, while around 600 gathered outside a synagogue in the eastern city of Strasbourg.
In Israel, hundreds of people gathered outside the French embassy in Tel Aviv, waving French and Israeli flags and placards with slogans such as “Shame on France”.
“I’m ashamed to be French, the France of my childhood not exists,” said Roselyne Mimouni, a Franco-Israeli retiree.
“I am appalled that a Jewish woman was murdered in France because she was Jewish,” she added.
Israeli lawmakers from throughout the political spectrum attended, with Diaspora Minister Omer Yankelevitch calling the courtroom’s determination “absurd, scandalous and harmful”.
“From Tel Aviv to Paris, the Jewish people, in Israel and the entire world, stand in solidarity with the Halimi family and the Jewish community of France,” she stated.
Jewish teams say the courtroom ruling has made Jews much less protected in France, whereas legal professionals representing Halimi’s household have stated they may take the case to the European Court of Human Rights.
French Jews have been repeatedly focused by jihadists in latest years, most notably in 2012, when an Islamist gunman shot useless three kids and a instructor at a Jewish faculty in the southern metropolis of Toulouse.
In 2015, a pro-Islamic State radical gunned down 4 individuals at a Jewish grocery store in Paris.
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