Tariq Ramadan will be tried for raping three women after his appeals were dismissed

Tariq Ramadan will be tried for aggravated rape and the rape of three women between 2009 and 2016. The Court of Cassation rejected, on Wednesday, October 9, the appeals presented by the Swiss Islamologist, making his referral to trial definitive, Agence France-Presse learned. (AFP), from judicial sources.

Mr. Ramadan contested the allegations in these appeals. After his rejection, he will be tried by the Paris departmental criminal court, in this emblematic investigation of the #metoo era that began at the end of 2017.

On July 7, 2023, after six years of investigation, two investigating judges ordered the dismissal of Mr. Ramadan for violations against “Christelle”, Henda Ayari, Mounia Rabbouj and a fourth woman. On June 27, the Paris Court of Appeal ordered a trial against Ramadan for aggravated rape of a woman and two rapes of two other people.

The Islamologist and a fourth woman, Mounia Rabbouj, had filed opposing appeals: the first requested the general dismissal of the case and the second the addition of their accusations rejected by the appeal court.

At Wednesday’s hearing, both the rapporteur and the attorney general advocated for the non-admission of these appeals, a procedure that allows non-serious or inadmissible appeals to be quickly dismissed.

The two judges considered in particular that these requests tended to call into question the substantive assessment of the investigating chamber, while the role of the Court of Cassation is limited to verifying the absence of an error of law. No attorney, in defense of Mr. Ramadan or in support of Mr.^me Rabbouj did not defend his written observations orally.

Convicted in Switzerland

However, in its June 27 ruling, the appeals court dismissed M’s case.^me Rabbouj, thinks the opposite of the investigating judges. Until now, the investigation had focused on influence, maintaining violence as the main ploy of the violations attributed to Mr. Ramadan.

In this landmark and highly publicized proceeding, complainants described particularly brutal sexual relations. The story of Mounia Rabbouj, who presented a dress stained with the Islamologist’s semen, forced the intellectual, who had initially denied it, to admit in mid-2018 the existence of adulterous relations with her and his former lovers. “of domination”rude but “spoiled”an important turning point on this issue.

In Switzerland, the preacher was sentenced at the end of August to three years in prison, including one for rape and sexual coercion in 2008. His lawyers appealed to the Federal Court, the supreme judicial authority of the Swiss Confederation.