Three Frenchmen are brought before a court, Tuesday, on charges of assaulting an Arab teenager, after broadcasting a report on Al-Jazeera in which members of an extremist right-wing group uttered racist statements in a store in Lille, northern France.
Two of them are being tried for direct incitement to a terrorist act and advocacy of hatred.
According to “Euronews,” the prosecution opened an investigation last December, after a report entitled “The Generation of Hate” was broadcast on the island.
The film “Hate Generation”, which documents with sound and image, the shocking statements of elements affiliated with the French extreme right, inciting to kill and target Muslims, and belong to the “identity group” with a Nazi orientation.
Scenes from the “Generation Identity” group were filmed with a hidden camera, especially in their “La Citadelle” bar in the heart of Lille.
Many shopkeepers boasted of their “racist attacks” on people of Arab descent, and scenes of attacking a girl they said were Maghreb.
Remy F. (32), the most severe penalty, which is five years in prison, because he mentioned a car attack on a market in a popular neighborhood in Lille.
The comments were filmed with a hidden camera, according to his lawyer Eric Catlin-Dino, who was running for the far-right National Rally party for Lille in the recent municipal elections.
Etienne F. (26), before the Lille Criminal Court on charges of “public incitement to hatred or violence,” especially because of his performance of the Nazi salute.
They will also be tried with the last accused, Guillaume D. The 31-year-old is under judicial supervision, accused of “violence at a meeting” for assaulting a 14-year-old teenager from North Africa in January 2018.
The lawyer for “SOS Racism”, an anti-racism organization that has filed a civil lawsuit, Nicholas Neff Nave, expressed his hope that “justice will shed light on the discriminatory nature of the acts that appeared in these videos.”
“There is an ideology behind all this,” he told AFP. “The judiciary’s response must be strong.”
