National Rally leader Marine Le Pen and MEP Gilbert Collard were in court this week as prosecutors demand a 5,000 euro fine against the two for exposing Islamic State atrocities by sharing pictures of them on Twitter in 2015.
The two French politicians had posted the photographs after journalist Jean-Jacques Bourdin compared the Front National, as National Rally was formerly known, to the radical Islamic terrorist group.
Both politicians admit to posting the photographs but protested the hate speech charges against them, French newspaper Le Figaro reports, with Le Pen stating: “It is crime, not photographic reproduction of the crime, that undermines human dignity!”
Le Pen compared the images to the photograph of Aylan Kurdi, a child who had drowned during the height of the migrant crisis in 2015 whose picture made front pages of newspapers worldwide, stating: “This photo was published by the entire French media without the prosecutor’s office ever finding a reason to initiate a prosecution of any kind.”
Mr Collard, meanwhile, said that if he were in the presence of a Holocaust denier, he was legally allowed to show them evidence of the genocide through photographs, and added: “If I am facing someone who denies violence against women, can’t I show pictures?”
The prosecutor in the case defended the action against the populist politicians, saying: “There is bound to be a choice to be made, and this choice is made according to the impact on public order that an action may have. In this case, there was a disturbance to public order brought by this case.”
A representative of the public prosecutor demanded a 5,000 euro fine against the politicians, while Ms Le Pen denounced the procedure as a “political trial”. The verdict is scheduled for May 4th.
Le Pen was stripped of her parliamentary immunity in the European Parliament over the tweets in 2017 — prior to coming second in that year’s French presidential election — when she served as an MEP for the former Front National.
The prosecution comes as Le Pen become a major challenger to President Emmanuel Macron. Polls place the populist and the globalist neck-and-neck in both the first round of voting and a potential second-round run-off ahead of the next presidential election.