Paris (AFP)
A fine of 800 euros was requested Monday against the militant "anti-negrophobia" who had tagged the statue of Colbert in front of the National Assembly, and whose trial is held on the day of the 20th anniversary of the Taubira law recognizing the slavery and trafficking as crimes against humanity.
The decision will be rendered on June 28.
The coincidence of the calendar wanted the trial, postponed twice, to finally be held on the date of the National Day of Remembrance of the Slavery and their Abolition, marked this year by the 20 years of the law of May 21, 2001 worn by the former Minister of Justice Christiane Taubira when she was a member of parliament.
President Emmanuel Macron and several ministers were to participate in the afternoon in a ceremony commemorating the law.
In front of the court, the Guadeloupe activist Franco Lollia, 49, arrived in jeans, black sweatshirt with the logo "Anti-Negrophobia Brigade" and big silver glasses on his nose, admitted "the facts".
"I recognize that I wanted to challenge the State, tell him that if he accepts that Colbert continues to be enthroned in front of the National Assembly, the house of the people, it is because France is still viscerally negrophobic", a- he declared.
On June 23, 2020, in front of the National Assembly, he had tagged "State Negroophobia" in red on the base of the statue of Colbert, Minister of Louis XIV and initiator of the Black Code which legislated on slavery in the colonies French.
He then threw red paint on the statue.
He was immediately arrested.
"What is forbidden is racism. This man (Colbert) defends negrophobia", he told the police, in a scene filmed and posted on the networks social by the Anti-Negrophobia Brigade.
"I am not a vulgar delinquent, a scribbler", also said Franco Lollia in court in front of a room full of his supporters, speaking of a "political act".
The prosecutor Vincent Plumas, him, warned from the beginning, and while the four lawyers of the militant had already returned at length on the fight which animated their client and the history of slavery, that he would stick to purely legal developments ".
If the hearing allowed him to fill certain "gaps" in history, he asked the court to stick to the facts, "simple", and not disputed, and to condemn Franco Lollia.
The statue's tag came in the wake of anti-racism protests around the world after the death of George Floyd, a black man, in a violent police arrest in the United States.
Since then, monuments and statues linked to French colonial history or to the slave trade have been at the center of a memorial controversy.
© 2021 AFP