Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right Front National, has accused the government of using the judiciary to persecute her as she appeared on trial for hate-speech after comparing Muslims praying in the streets to the Nazi occupation.



Le Pen told the court in Lyon she had not committed any offence and had been expressing “political ideas” as part of her role as a politician when making the comments in a speech at a party rally in the city in 2010.

She stood by her remarks, saying she had used the word occupation “with a small o” and had not been referring to the second world war. She denied Islamophobia and said street prayers were a threat to public order, arguing they were “not a race, ethnicity or religion, but a behaviour”.

Outside court, Le Pen said the French justice minister Christiane Taubira was running “a real judicial persecution” of her and the Front National.

Four anti-racism and human rights groups have brought the case against Le Pen on charges of “incitement to discrimination, violence or hatred towards a group of people on the basis of their religion”.

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Le Pen’s remarks in 2010 came while she was campaigning to take over the party’s leadership from her father and FN founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen. She referred to “street prayers” after reports of Muslims praying in public in three French cities, including Paris, because of the absence of mosques or lack of space in local prayer rooms.

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She said: “I’m sorry, but for those who really like to talk about the second world war, if we’re talking about occupation, we can also talk about this while we’re at it, because this is an occupation of territory,” she told supporters, prompting waves of applause.

“It’s an occupation of swaths of territory, of areas in which religious laws apply … for sure, there are no tanks, no soldiers, but it’s an occupation all the same and it weighs on people.”

It is the first time Marine Le Pen has faced charges for hate speech, although her father, now 87, has several convictions for the offence, including a conviction for contesting crimes against humanity after saying the Nazi occupation of France was not “particularly inhumane”.

Before the trial in Lyon, the Muslim Council of France said that “by comparing French Muslims to Nazis”, Marine Le Pen had been attacking their honour and taking liberties with history. It warned that this type of statement “fed the climate of Islamophobia which we live in at the moment”.

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In court, the French state prosecutor recommended that judges find Le Pen not guilty, saying that her comments were part of her freedom of expression.

The judges will retire to deliberate and give their verdict at a later date. The penalty for inciting racial hatred in France is up to a year in prison and a fine of €45,000 (£33,000).

Marine Le Pen took over the leadership of the Front National from her father in 2011 and sought to boost her presidential ambitions with a public relations drive to “detoxify” the party and move it away from the racist, jackbooted, antisemitic imagery of the past. But the Front National’s fundamental anti-immigration message and emphasis on Islam has remained.

Le Pen is fighting to win control of the northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie in December’s regional elections, a move that will test her popularity before a 2017 presidential bid. Polls this month have showed she is likely to win the regional race in the north.



Rights groups have battled to bring the hate speech case to court since 2010. When the European parliament lifted Le Pen’s parliamentary immunity in July 2013, a preliminary inquiry was opened.



Earlier this year, an all-out war broke out between father and daughter following inflammatory comments Jean-Marie Le Pen made belittling the Holocaust and lauding France’s Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime. Marine Le Pen suspended her father from the party he co-founded in 1972 and moved to scrap his position as honorary president. In a vicious public spat, he disowned her and they stopped speaking. Since then, they have been battling it out in the courts.



Jean-Marie Le Pen is to face a separate criminal trial over the comments he made in April in which he repeated that “gas chambers were a detail” of the second world war. He will stand trial for denying crimes against humanity. Jean-Marie Le Pen told AFP he did not “for one moment” regret his words.

