Eric Zemmour convicted on appeal for describing Hapsatou Sy’s first name as an “insult to France”

Eric Zemmour was convicted on Thursday March 28 by the Paris Court of Appeal for racist insult for having described the first name of former C8 columnist Hapsatou Sy in September 2018 as an “insult to France”.

In its judgment, the court confirmed the judgment rendered at first instance in January 2024. The criminal court had found the far-right polemicist guilty of “public insult due to origin, ethnicity, nation, race or religion” and imposed a fine of 4,000 euros on him. Mr. Zemmour was also ordered to pay 3,000 euros in damages and 2,000 euros in legal fees to Ms. Sy.

On Thursday, the court of appeal also ordered the founder of the Reconquest party to pay an additional 3,000 euros to Ms. Sy for procedural costs.

The incriminated remarks were made, and cut during editing, during the recording of the program “Les Terriens du Dimanche”, broadcast on C8 (Canal group).

“A great victory”

“It’s your first name that is an insult to France. France is not a virgin land, it is a land with a history, with a past. Your first name is not in history, you are in the depths of France,” Mr. Zemmour told Ms. Sy. He added that the columnist’s mother should have taken a “first name from the calendar” and called her “Corinne for example”.

During the hearing before the Court of Appeal on February 29, the Advocate General considered that the first name being an “essential attribute” of identity “attacking the first name of Ms. Sy because of its supposed foreign origin is disrespect or even contempt for France”.

Ms. Sy had detailed the consequences of these comments on her personal life. “I receive 3,000 to 4,000 hate messages per day, (…) I am the subject of online harassment, I am targeted by death threats, calls for my rape and stoning,” he said. she declared. On Thursday, she praised to Agence France-Presse a judgment which is “a great victory which goes beyond [her]” and the “end of a long ordeal which cost me my career and my health”.

Mr. Zemmour indicated that he intended to appeal to the Court of Cassation. In a press release, he denounced “these politicized judges [who] want to condemn [him] for intimidating the French.”