The parent company of the French weekly conservative magazine Valeurs Actuelles has announced it will be taking the far-left activist group Sleeping Giants to court.
Valmonde et Cie, who owns the magazine, has filed a complaint in the Judicial Court of Paris against the activist group, which has put pressure on advertisers to stop advertising on right-wing and conservative websites for the last several years.
“The purpose of this complaint is to denounce acts of discrimination, on the grounds of political opinions, and likely to hinder the normal exercise of an economic activity,” the company said in a letter to the Paris public prosecutor, Valeurs Actuelles reports.
The magazine goes on to accuse the activist group of engaging in an “industrial sabotage campaign” and says that it has been one of Sleeping Giants’ chief targets since it began its operations in France in 2017.
Basile Ader, one of the lawyers for the magazine, stated: “This hindrance to the engagement in economic activity is all the more worrying as it is exercised by a very structured organization, deployed on a global scale, and always acting under the immunity of anonymity.”
According to the magazine, the criminal code in which they are pursuing the activist group could result in a fine of 45,000 euros and a maximum prison sentence of three years.
The legal action by the French magazine comes after years of activism by the group in several countries, including the United States, where the group was formed by advertising industry professionals Nandini Jammi and Matt Rivitz.
In 2019, Sleeping Giants, along with the group SumOfUs, pressured the credit card giant Mastercard to blacklist those they deemed “hate groups” by protesting at the company’s annual general meeting (AGM).
Earlier in 2019, SumOfUs had attempted to pressure Mastercard into establishing a “human rights committee” to monitor payments to those deemed far right, but the company’s shareholders voted down the proposal at the AGM.