A Swiss appeals court on Tuesday found Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan guilty of rape and sexual coercion in a Geneva hotel 15 years ago, overturning last year’s lower court acquittal.
AFP reports the court said it “annuls the judgement of 24 May 2023” and sentenced the former Oxford professor to three years in prison, two of them suspended.
Swiss-born Ramadan, 62, is the grandson of the founder of the Islamist movement the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and wrote his doctoral thesis on his ancestor.
Named by Time Magazine in 2004 among the 100 most influential people in the world for his influence on European Muslims, Ramadan has stirred controversy throughout his intellectual career.
File/Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan (C) leaves Geneva courthouse between his lawyers Theo Badan (L) and Yael Hayat on May 24, 2023, after he was acquitted at the end of his trial for “rape and sexual coercion” in a case dating back 15 years. (FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images)
Alongside the now concluded Swiss case, a Paris appeals court ruled in June this year Ramadan should be tried for raping three women between 2009 and 2016, a decision his lawyers have challenged.
The scholar spent more than nine months in pre-trial detention in 2018, but was released in November that year.
Ramadan said he had not carried out “a single act, behaviour or sex act that was not discussed beforehand” with the women despite allegations of slapping, choking, and non-consensual penetration by his many accusers.
Ramadan was a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University.
He was banned from entering the United States by the George W. Bush administration in 2004 after it was alleged he donated to the Association de Secours Palestinien (ASP/ Palestinian Relief Organisation) from 1998 to 2002.
The U.S. government considered the ASP a group that funded terrorism by giving some of their donations to the anti-Israel terrorist organisation Hamas which is proscribed in the U.S.
Ramadan’s supporters previously used social media networks to claim the sexual assault allegations were all part of a global “Zionist plot,” as Breitbart News reported.