Once explored the circumstances around the incriminated words, I’m left with the most disturbing. You have one side ready to exploit in a partisan way the incident and the court‘s decision and on the other side an enterprise of silencing whoever may disagree with their political rhetoric aimed too often at hiding communities conflicts of interests. If the freedom of speech isn’t a french thing, to choose to promote it through a controversial issue around the transparency of crime statistics is I am afraid a little partisan. To be honest, that kind of political divide doesn’t help to overcome the passions that lead to the all incident on both sides, and worse, prevent to pay an extra attention  to the conditions under which one is convicted under the french laws and how works the french judicial system, obviously the criminal trial brought into light.

A first conclusion has to be the lack of public guidelines and knowledge of the legislations goals.

Looking at it and the debates that surrounded the legislation when it was adopted, the article under which he was declared guilty had nothing to do with the situation the court had to judge. How he was charged with “incitement to racial hatred” looks a mystery to me.

The legislation and the article more specifically aimed at criminalize the “incitement to racial hatred” answer to some specifics not met here. The legislation, you may understand under the historical references the law makers made when it was adopted, targeted “any propaganda tool and propaganda” serving an ideology of hatred, racial and else. The obvious conclusion, it was designed to allow courts to silence any individual or group promoting racial hatred in public using writings, public speeches, screams?, graphics and else aimed at spreading, support and explain with arguments to justify the ideology involved.

Anyhow you look at the incident involved in the case, you are miles away to me from the legislation intended goals? The conversation involved was about statistics and unless proved otherwise, the trial didn’t, the suspect does not belong to any organisation promoting an ideology of hatred and death, never promoted such an ideology, no more was any reference made during the incriminated conversation to such an ideology directly or else.

How he was charged and convicted of the crime is still by far the most interesting.

It looks that both the prosecutor who charged the suspect and the court that declared him guilty chose to assume that any form of transparency of the crime statistics up to just mention some partial results can only lead the potential audience of the show on that day to the conclusion that “genetics”, race or else is involved in defining who commit crimes, meaning their guess of the potential show’s audience interpretation and understanding of the statistics has been defining whether or not the suspect did actually commit the crime?

(Comment : Defining the suspect’s guilt through a second guess of a tv show’s audience ability to demonstrate or feel inappropriately is just insane)