The first sentences have been handed down following the riots in Paris on Saturday, May 31st after PSG won the Champions League. While we can applaud the authorities’ determination to bring the troublemakers to justice quickly, the leniency of the verdicts stirs scandal. The sentences are completely disproportionate to the seriousness of the offences.
On Monday, June 2nd, four people were tried in summary proceedings. There are approximately sixty defendants in total.
The first images of the ongoing trials raise questions. The language used gives the impression that we are dealing with acts of petty crime, not a civil war-like siege of the capital. “I am not a violent person,” said one defendant, immediately contradicted by the presiding judge: “You can celebrate a victory without mortar. You didn’t find it lying around, you bought it beforehand on Snapchat.” “He realised the seriousness of his actions after the fact,” was even heard during the hearing.
The defendants, who are “sorry” and admit to having made “a mistake,” have so far received insignificant sentences: fines, suspended prison terms from 2 to 8 months, and citizenship courses. The sums claimed are derisory: €500 fines represent less than the excess that the owners of the burnt-out cars will have to pay to their insurance companies to be compensated for their vehicles reduced to ashes. Community service sentences (which are optional) were not imposed.
With deaths, hundreds of fires, and firefighters and police officers in coma, Emmanuel Macron had promised a criminal response “commensurate with the crime.” “We will prosecute, we will punish, we will be relentless,” the president of the republic said on Sunday after strongly condemning the night’s violence.
However, the defendants all walked free from court, a testament to the deep-rooted laxity of the French judicial system, which renders any statements of firmness by the executive branch meaningless.
The totally inadequate criminal response leaves many prominent figures with a deep sense of frustration. Even the Minister of Justice, Gérald Darmanin, considers the sentences absurd. He is proposing to abolish mandatory sentence adjustments, remove suspended sentences and introduce a systematic minimum sentence once guilt has been established. “Some of the sentences are no longer commensurate with the violence our country is experiencing,” he said on X when the first verdicts were announced.
Controversy has once again arisen over the first names of the accused. On the main news channels, only one first name was given, that of the first defendant, a certain ‘Aurélien’—one of the few, if not the only one, with a French-sounding first name. The remaining list of names left little doubt as to the profile of the accused: Bayo, Brahim, Ali, and Anasse followed Aurélien, but their first names were not mentioned.
The government, for its part, is trying to downplay the events, explaining that the violence was “no worse” than during other similar popular events. The fact that fact-checking teams have looked into the matter is an admission in itself.
