Steeve Briois, mayor of Hénin-Beaumont for the National Rally (RN) since 2014 and close to Marine Le Pen, and two other leaders of the National Front (FN, the former name of the RN), were released on Tuesday 3 September , by the court of Nanterre, where they were tried on 18 June for “inciting racial hatred”. They were sued by nine human rights associations, led by the Maison des Potes – Maison de l’Égalité, for having published, in September 2013, a “Small practical guide for municipal representatives of the National Front”, on the eve of the 2014 municipal elections.
Steeve Briois, then general secretary of the party, began by explaining that candidates must “defending national priority (e.g. in the allocation of social housing)”The associations intended to take the case to trial. “national preference”, the reformulation of this central element of the far-right party’s programme, but the court focused on a rigorous reading of the procedure and did not consider the issue in any way.
The guide, distributed to the media, quickly disappeared from the FN website, but Marie-Thérèse Costa-Fesenbeck, then the party’s delegate in the Pyrénées-Orientales, distributed it in November 2013 on the party’s website in the department, m66.fr. , now closed. The court recalled that publication on a site was governed by the law of 29 July 1982 on audiovisual communication, and that its legal representative was the director of the publication, the authors being, as in the press law, only accomplices. However, the name of the director of the publication was not included. “It was not analyzed during the investigation”The verdict states that the investigation into the case was very incomplete. The website of the Federation of the Eastern Pyrenees does not have legal personality, and therefore it is a natural person who is the director of the publication, who puts it online.
Personal initiative
The domain name was reserved on January 11, 2012 with the company OVH: “It is clear that no request was made to the company to know the name of the person who reserved the domain name and who is responsible for paying the server rental.”The judges say severely. Further information would be useless, the site has been closed for years…
However, in the absence of an editorial director, it is possible to pursue the accomplices, namely Steeve Briois, author of the preface, and Sophie Montel, editor of the guide; she has since slammed the door of the party in 2017 after spending twenty years there. But, the court recalls, “However, it must be proven that the defendants knew that these comments were intended to be published on the m66.fr site.”It is in fact the moral element that establishes complicity. And since the publication of the guide was a personal initiative of Marie-Thérèse Costa-Fesenbeck, resident in Perpignan, “lack of sufficient evidence of the personal and voluntary participation of Steeve Briois and Sophie Montel”were released.
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