A Swiss court has sentenced a writer to 60 days in jail for calling an obese lesbian journalist a “fat lesbian” on social media.
LGBTQ+ groups heralded the court’s draconian ruling as a “win” in the battle against “hate speech.”
“French-Swiss polemicist Alain Bonnet, who goes by Alain Soral, was sentenced by the Lausanne court for the crimes of defamation, discrimination and incitement to hatred after he criticized Catherine Macherel, a journalist for Swiss newspapers Tribune de Geneve and 24 Heures,” Fox News reports.
60 days in prison over an insult. Free speech is on its deathbed and nobody cares. pic.twitter.com/owB9jvTSlk
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) October 4, 2023
100percentfedup.com reports: Soral made the so-called ‘hateful’ comments in a Facebook video two years ago.
Fox News reports:
“This court decision is an important moment for justice and rights of LGBTQI people in Switzerland,” said Murial Waeger, co-director of a lesbian activist group. “The conviction of Alain Soral is a strong signal that homophobic hatred cannot be tolerated in our society.”
In addition to the prison time, Soral was subsequently ordered to pay legal fees and fines totaling thousands of Swiss francs.
Soral’s sentencing came after he called Macherel a “fat lesbian,” criticized her work as a “queer activist” and said she was “unhinged” in a social media video, according to Swiss public broadcaster RTS.
Pascal Junod, a lawyer for Soral, mockingly blasted the conviction for a “crime of opinion” in an email to The Associated Press. He said the case aimed to probe whether a person had “sinned against the dogmas of single thought.”
The court’s ruling has some Americans concerned that authoritarian types will try that in the United States.
They certainly will try to silence opposition.
If we give an inch, the authoritarians will take a mile.
The battle to protect our inalienable rights never takes a day off.
NBC News added:
Soral will appeal to Swiss federal court and “if necessary” to the European Court of Human Rights, the lawyer wrote.
Waeger said the verdict represented a milestone in the application of a measure approved by Swiss voters in 2020 that made it illegal to discriminate against people on the basis of sexual orientation.
Soral was convicted repeatedly in France and sentenced to jail time in 2019 for denying the Holocaust, which is a crime in France.
